RSS
Republican Hoover built the federal broadcasting shield in 1927. Roosevelt fashioned it into a weapon in 1934 and Democrats have never put it down since. One might consider the elaborate FCC speech barriers: A Poll Tax on Public Debate
One of the more enduring myths accepted as reality in our modern society is that America has a relatively free press. The ruling authorities and their entrenched accomplices promote that lie as diligently as they work to ensure that it never again becomes true.
America did have a mostly free and independent press until the rise of broadcasting in the 1920s. Within a few years, a small group of Republicans, progressives and corporate interests successfully nationalized the airwaves with restrictive licensing that blocked competition, rewarded insiders and squelched dissent.
Over the next few decades, the increasingly powerful medium of radio and then television drowned out the previously broad spectrum of information and ideas—with often three or more diverse choices of daily newspapers in many U.S. cities—and turned free speech into carefully rationed federal broadcasting privileges, their anointed urban newspaper monopolies and a few approved magazines.
One of the more ironic parts of this forgotten history is that a Republican, Herbert Hoover, led the initial charge to politicize the press. When the more authoritarian FDR took the reins in 1933—holding onto power until his death in 1945—he would ultimately purge the airwaves as well as the newspaper and magazine stands of the nation’s greatest commentators, publishers, editors and writers. In their absence, only pro-war / pro-welfare state neo-liberals and neo-conservatives would survive in mainstream media for generations to come.
During Roosevelt’s tenure in office, administration officials and prominent associates would wage a scorched-earth campaign against any independent voice of dissent while generously rewarding supporters. Popular radio talk-show hosts Father Charles Coughlin and Boake Carter were dramatically forced off the air. New Republic columnist and author John Flynn was successfully targeted for censorship by FDR himself. Independent newspaper publisher William Randolph Hearst, a lifelong Democrat who initially supported FDR but later soured to New Deal abuses, was vilified and marginalized. Robert “Colonel†McCormick of the Chicago Tribune got roughed up by Roosevelt’s cronies in a similar fashion.
(Anti-New Deal publishers Hearst and McCormick were so popular with the general public that their newspaper “holdings comprised over 50 percent of the country’s Sunday circulation†according to pro-FDR media historian Betty Houchin Winfield. Once those independent newsmen’s reputations were destroyed, establishment papers in New York and Washington D.C. would come into prominence.)
The Hollywood studios of Walt Disney were occupied by federal troops one day after Pearl Harbor. The editor and lead columnist for the Saturday Evening Post—middle-America’s most admired weekly read—were run off the magazine. Libertarian writer, Albert Jay Nock, was blacklisted. Editor for the liberal Nation magazine, Oswald Garrison Villard, met the same fate. Famous aviator and anti-war spokesman, Charles Lindbergh, found himself viscously condemned by pro-war media for quietly speaking the truth. Popular syndicated columnist at the Baltimore Sun, H.L. Mencken, may have “voluntarily†went into oblivion under hostile conditions that still don’t make sense.
These are just some of the big names that went down with a fight. (All of the bolded names above will receive some overdue exoneration a bit later.) No one will ever know how many other smaller fish were scared off from honest reporting as a result of political pressure.
Today, this would be like President Trump having his underlings run coordinated smear campaigns and putting the Washington Post, Time magazine, and both MSNBC and CNN out of business or replacing their editorial staff with reliable pro-Trump lackies. To complete the parallel, a Trump campaign spokesman in Hollywood would have to direct a movie portraying a major publisher (say, Arthur Sulzberger of the NYT) as a hideous demagogue… all in good sport, of course.
(Mainstream media goes berserk when Trump merely defends himself from personal attacks during hostile press conferences or from wild conspiracy theories. Back in the 1930s, reporters were far more dignified in their principled disagreement with New Deal policies. And President Roosevelt was much more underhanded in dealing with the press than Trump’s frequent social-media salvos—many of which are so obvious as to be written in ALL CAPS.)
Hoover’s Enduring Legacy: A Poll Tax on Public Debate
Republican Herbert Hoover—who served as President from March 1929 to March 1933—is most known for being the unlucky occupant of the Oval Office during the New York City stock market crash of October 1929. (The Governor of New York at this time—Franklin Delano Roosevelt—usually gets left out of that narrative.)
“Wonder Boy†Hoover—as nicknamed by Republican predecessor Calvin Coolidge over his penchant for meddling—took major strides to increase spending, bailout failed banks, micro-manage the economy and “take action†during his single term in office. Unfortunately, his political mischief was not limited to economics.
Hoover’s most enduring and damaging legacy to overall freedom in America—rarely acknowledged in mainstream press—was his nationalizing of all formerly private and well-established common law broadcasting property rights, as documented by economist Thomas Hazlett and others. Hoover himself would later reminisce in his 1952 memoirs:
“One of our troubles in getting legislation [to nationalize the airwaves] was the very success of the voluntary system we had created. Members of the Congressional committees kept saying, ‘it is working well, so why bother?’†(as quoted by B.K. Marcus)
As Secretary of Commerce under Presidents Harding and then Coolidge, Hoover used his position to reward large corporations (that eventually became propaganda monoliths NBC and CBS and subsequent replicas) by severely restricting access to the airwaves, while empowering government to arbitrarily harass any independent voices, which gradually disappeared from mass-media over the next generation. The resulting Radio Act of 1927 created sweeping federal powers to award or deny initial membership privileges (with periodic renewals) to an exclusive broadcasting fraternity based on subjective standards of operating in the “public interest, convenience, and necessity.â€
One of the few books available on the topic of federal broadcast rationing is Rebels on the Air: An Alternative History of Radio in America, by Jesse Walker of Reason magazine. Delving into the political atmosphere of the time, Walker notes:
Every year from 1922 to 1925, Hoover hosted a national conference for the radio industry. The legal scholar Jonathan Emord, drawing on the conference records, has sketched a convincing theory of competition-fearing broadcasters [such as RCA-NBC and its parent companies General Electric and Westinghouse] and power-seeking government officials reaching a quid pro quo: “in exchange for regulatory controls on industry structure and programming content, industry leaders would be granted the restrictions on market entry that they wanted.â€
Another good read on New Deal media history is Justin Raimondo’s Reclaiming the American Right: The Lost Legacy of the Conservative Movement. This book, written in 1993 and updated in 2008, has entire chapters on Garet Garrett of the Saturday Evening Post, columnist and author John Flynn, and publisher Robert McCormick of the Chicago Tribune. These chapters cover about 100 pages and provide excellent insights to the time period. Strangely, the author couldn’t afford a single kind word for popular independent publisher Bill Hearst (barely mentioned) or any acknowledgement at all for radio sensation Charles Coughlin—both targets of FDR suppression.
Robert Murphy’s Politically Incorrect Guide to the Great Depression and the New Deal provides a refreshing history of 1920s to 1940s economic affairs, with lengthy excerpts from other good books on the subject. Unfortunately, the P.I. Guide falls for the myth of a “liberal†media and omits any reference to the landmark Radio Act of 1927 or the Communications Act of 1934.
A 2004 essay by B.K. Marcus published by the Mises Institute gives a concise account of federal broadcasting controls. This work excels on legal theory and general history, but is silent on Roosevelt. A 2017 article in Reason magazine titled “FDR’s War Against the Press†finally sheds some light on this dark chapter of American culture, but leaves most of the victims buried and forgotten. I hope to expand upon all of the above.
Outside of these few offerings (and some obscure books and articles footnoted therein) mainstream media shows virtually no interest in Roosevelt’s harsh treatment of the press, which was calculated and brutal. Wikipedia goes to great contortions to justify Roosevelt’s censoring, as we shall soon see. PBS’s 13-hour infomercial “The Roosevelts – An Intimate History†(available on Netflix) manages to be even worse. When it comes to New Deal narratives, Hollywood and major media offer only glib platitudes on FDR’s efforts for “saving†the nation and providing “relief†for the common man—both of which are highly debatable. (Mr. Murphy’s P.I. Guide and economist Robert Higgs give ample evidence to suggest that Hoover and especially FDR made the Depression worse.)
To date, nothing I can find in mainstream or alternative media does justice to the enormous harm to public welfare caused by FDR’s war on the press, or Hoover’s enduring legacy of federal broadcasting controls. These arbitrary restrictions on the most powerful medium of news publishing amount to a crushing poll tax on public debate—far more debilitating than the despised poll tax on voting had ever been.
The contrast in restricted speech rights and nearly unlimited voting privileges is dramatic. The traditional poll tax required prior to voting in some southern states—banned in federal elections by the 24th Amendment in 1964 and outlawed in all elections by the Supreme Court in 1966—had only cost a few dollars. Yet poll taxes supposedly created insurmountable obstacles to poor people expressing their inalienable right to vote, which often means voting themselves more welfare. Federal speech restrictions effectively disenfranchise over 99.9% of Americans, rich or poor, from the powerful platforms of radio and TV broadcasting. Nonetheless, modern politicians and approved pundits unanimously support FCC speech rationing to keep out independent voices.
With a second (ostensibly “greenâ€) New Deal in the works and internet freedom under constant threat, a more thorough history of the original New Deal in relation to independent reporting is long overdue.
“I can lead a nation with a microphone†(from Flobots’ song “Handlebarsâ€)
When it comes to Franklin D. Roosevelt and the media, most mainstream accounts show a charming FDR comforting American families gathered round their home radios, in some cases, next to a fireplace. And that’s about as deep as the story goes.
During his three-plus terms in office, Roosevelt staged 30 such “fireside chats.†Some of them, like during the 1933 banking collapse and his 1941-42 maneuvering the U.S. into war, engaged over half the nation listening in to his well-rehearsed speeches.
Conventional accounts—in Wikipedia, the PBS-Roosevelt docudrama, multiple books and dozens of articles I’ve reviewed—never mention that these “chats†were advertising for partisan Democrat purposes. As such, the unilateral Roosevelt speeches were multi-billion-dollar political gifts in today’s currency. There was apparently no opportunity for a GOP response. And the radio press was largely neutered in its ability to put any of Roosevelt’s wild proposals into context.
What precipitated the climate of fear in broadcasting is another topic of embarrassment rarely mentioned in mainstream circles. Thanks to the efforts of Herbert Hoover and some liberal sponsors of corporate media control, the Radio Act of 1927 created the Federal Radio Commission (FRC) and gave it enormous latitude for enforcement. Giant corporations got the broadcasting cartel they longed for. Liberals got a tool for censorship they desired.
FDR’s handywork in the Communications Act of 1934 replaced the FRC with the Federal Communications Commission and gave government regulators even more arbitrary power. And Franklin Roosevelt frequently used these broad powers to his advantage. In the New Dealers’ opinions, criticizing FDR’s frenetic policies was never in the “public interest.â€
University of Alabama history professor David Beito’s 2017 article “FDR’s War Against the Press†recounts some of the early fears of U.S. radio broadcasters. While Roosevelt complained bitterly about the “poisonous propaganda†of newspaper columnists:
Roosevelt’s relationship with radio was warmer. The key distinction was that broadcasters operated in an entirely different political context: Thanks to federal rules and administrators, they had to tread much more lightly than newspapers did. At its inception in 1934, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) reduced the license renewal period for stations from three years to only six months.
Mr. Beito explains how federal rules impacted radio broadcasters during the New Deal, at a time before television was commercially available:
It did not take long for broadcasters to get the message. NBC, for example, announced that it was limiting broadcasts “contrary to the policies of the United States government.†CBS Vice President Henry A. Bellows said that “no broadcast would be permitted over the Columbia Broadcasting System that in any way was critical of any policy of the Administration.†He elaborated “that the Columbia system was at the disposal of President Roosevelt and his administration and they would permit no broadcast that did not have his approval.†Local station owners and network executives alike took it for granted, as Editor and Publisher observed, that each station had “to dance to Government tunes because it is under Government license.†Some dissident radio commentators, such as Father Charles Coughlin and Boake Carter, gained wide audiences. But radio as a whole was firmly pro-Roosevelt—and both Coughlin and Carter were eventually forced off the air for pushing the envelope too far.
For this essay, I’ll only touch briefly on radio personality Boake Carter before moving on to more household names. Though long forgotten, he was once high on Roosevelt’s hit list.
Boake (pronounced “bokeâ€) Carter was born in England, moved to America in 1921 and began radio commentary in 1930. Wikipedia states:
In 1936, he had more listeners than any other radio commentator. … But by 1937, the Roosevelt White House already had three federal agencies investigating him. In 1938, under pressure from Roosevelt’s allies, he lost his WCAU [Philadelphia] job, was barred from CBS, and lost his General Foods sponsorship that had replaced Philco [Radios]. With his removal, there was no longer any popular radio commentator who opposed Roosevelt’s foreign policy.
The last sentence in bold seems to forget another prominent radio opponent of FDR’s foreign policy—Father Charles Coughlin, who was banished in 1940—but we get the drift. Based on Wikipedia’s hostile description of Boake Carter, one academic article online (that engages in overt victim shaming) and a surviving radio broadcast I could find, Mr. Carter was confident and eloquent, a World War I vet who understood the foolishness of unnecessary conflict, a critic of the New Deal and opponent of union violence. Naturally, radical leftists hated him. Modern historians have no use for him either.
Of all the Roosevelt purge victims, Wikipedia’s treatment of Boake Carter is arguably the least biased. For those on Roosevelt’s enemies list, contemporary historiography gets considerably worse. Yet others in the news media during the New Deal managed to stay in FDR’s favor.
Rewards for Loyal Press Servants
A separate essay could be justified to cover the corresponding rewards that the Roosevelt administration made available to the increasingly dominant throngs of pliant pressmen. Media historian Betty Houchin Winfield’s 1990 book FDR and the News Media scratches the surface on this important topic, but leaves more questions than answers.
Exclusive broadcast licensing rewarded primarily NBC and CBS with a near stranglehold on the airwaves throughout the Great Depression. Roosevelt also managed White House print media correspondents with strict access privileges that meant life or death to a journalist’s career.
While Ms. Winfield—a Missouri state professor and federal grant recipient—allows glimpses of pro-Roosevelt press gullibility, she remains harsh about all critics of the New Deal. For instance, Charles Coughlin was guilty of “demagoguery.†H.L. Mencken was “hostile†and “furious.†The “antagonistic†publishers Robert McCormick and William Randolph Hearst were waging a “frontal attack on those New Deal social and economic changes†out of their own “vested interests.†Professor Winfield provides almost no journalistic evidence in these men’s own words to corroborate her orthodox conclusions. Disagreeing with the New Deal simply means you are a bad person, according to this government scholar and many others in mass media.
Ms. Winfield—would could pass for a “moderate†by MSNBC standards—cites a few powerful but isolated anecdotes on gushing press adoration of Roosevelt’s antics, usually couched in the author’s own admiration for her subject. Franklin Roosevelt was so brash in his manipulation of the press:
Roosevelt would tell the correspondents exactly how to write stories. … “I suppose if I were writing your stories for you, I would say it is the most brutally frank Budget Message ever sent in.†… “In other words, if I were writing the story today I think it would be perfectly all right to say this, without putting in on me…†[about the “obligation†of his federal housing programs] The reporters became so used to his demands that by 1934 they began asking him for his news interpretations. (Winfield page 40, with more quotes like that)
One of many reporters who struggled to maintain his objectivity was Arthur Krock, Washington bureau chief of the New York Times. In Mr. Krock’s own memoirs, he described being questioned by FDR for not attending the jovial White House press performances. In response to Roosevelt’s query, Krock expressed his own difficulty in keeping his “objectivity when I’m close to you and watching you in action. You charm me so much that when I go back to write comment on the proceedings, I can’t keep it in balance.†(Winfield page 65)
Roosevelt would later reward Krock with an exclusive interview where FDR rationalized his failed court-packing plan of 1937. Historian Winfield “outs†Krock for violating press guidelines and allowing Roosevelt’s press secretary to review and edit his sensational “scoop†article published in the New York Times. Mr. Krock would be rewarded with a Pulitzer Prize for this adulterated reporting the following year.
The New Dealers’ arsenal also contained hundreds of federal employees in media relations who produced thousands of one-sided marketing handouts to frame a story to Roosevelt’s advantage, apparently a first in non-wartime American politics. Democrat publicity bureaus’ use of “press releases†to spin stories in Roosevelt’s favor was so great that:
In less than one year, the NRA [industrial cooperation agency] issued 5,200 handouts and the AAA [agricultural office] almost 5,000. … In the 1939 study Government Publicity, James L. McCamy found that during a seven-week period in 1937 the New York Times printed 1,281 items which appeared to have been released or influenced by administration publicity offices. (Winfield pages 90-91)
By 1940, newspaper publishers were so eager to gain favor with the powerful New Deal office of communications that 135 papers carried the musings of FDR’s wife, Eleanor, in her daily column. No president before or after Roosevelt has attempted such an overt spousal accommodation via the press.
The potentially larger problem of broadcast jingoism—simplicity and repetition of the New Deal’s favorite buzzwords—can only be assumed at this point based on a few surviving anecdotes and knowing the pattern of modern State media (fond of terms like “family farmers,†“climate change,†“social security†and other expensively misleading slogans). Until comprehensive transcripts of radio and television broadcast news become available, this segment of media history remains largely untold.
Roosevelt’s War on ‘The Colonel’
For our “feature length†members of FDR’s enemies list, a good place to start is in the American heartland. Pretty much from day one of the Roosevelt revolution, New Dealers set their targets on Robert “Colonel†McCormick and his Chicago Tribune. And they never took a break.
From the moment the Prince of Hyde Park, New York declared his candidacy for the highest office in 1932, Chicago’s leading paper had never bought into the Roosevelt charm. Actually, McCormick was familiar with Roosevelt from their time shared at the elite Groton prep school at the turn of the century, according to historian Ralph Raico. And he wasn’t impressed.
Now as an adult, McCormick—a trained lawyer and distinguished World War I veteran—diligently exposed the legal usurpations, agricultural ruin, union excesses and other economic chicanery throughout Roosevelt’s dreadful tenure. And he did it on a daily basis in America’s second biggest city, with the largest circulation among broadsheet newspapers. To get some idea of how seriously Roosevelt took criticism from his old schoolmate, Justin Raimondo’s chapter (page 151) on Colonel McCormick gives insight:
The Tribune featured a cartoon on the front page, and the New Dealers lived in terror of the deft pen strokes of [the paper’s two leading cartoonists]. Frank C. Waldrop, in The Colonel of Chicago, relates the fact that “[i]t was no idle rumor that men who knew their business took care to stay out of harm’s way, if possible, on days that Mr. Roosevelt… and other dignitaries of quick-firing temperament, had been depicted.â€
When FDR tried to use his ill-conceived National Recovery Administration (NRA) to seize effective control of the newspaper business during his first term, McCormick spoke out for press freedom during the annual meeting of the American Newspaper Publishers Association held in Manhattan. Based on popular mythology of a “liberal†Roosevelt fighting for American freedoms, one might think that New Dealers would welcome such an event. But that was not the case.
As McCormick lashed out at FDR inside the hall, 250,000 true believers in the [NRA] Blue Eagle paraded down Fifth Avenue, banners flying and in an ugly mood. This was the first indication that Roosevelt and his NRA mobs were getting ready to move against their opponents in the press… That summer in Washington, the NRA staged a propaganda campaign of unprecedented proportions, with marches, rallies, threats of boycott—and worse—for those who failed to cooperate. (Raimondo page 153)
Roosevelt hated the Chicago Tribune to such an extent that he worked with a wealthy supporter, silver-spoon retail heir Marshall Field III, to open a competing newspaper—the Chicago Sun in 1941 to siphon off the Tribune’s readers. But the public paid little attention to this obvious stunt.
Once the insipid “Franklin Son†was up and running, Roosevelt used his Attorney General to interfere with the Tribune’s exclusive franchise with the Associated Press, launching a three-year court battle that ended in 1945 with a victory for the meddling president. (To get some feel for the disposition of Mr. Field, he would later finance and sit on the board of directors for Chicago’s professional community agitator Saul Alinsky.)
From the mid-1930s until the end of the war, the Chicago Tribune endured public burning of its newspapers, angry protests, boycotts, shrill pamphlets, vicious personal smears in the pro-FDR press, IRS harassment and even treats of prosecution for “treason.†The Tribune survived the affair, but was financially and politically damaged.
This was Franklin D. Roosevelt in action. And he had a few more scores to settle.
Citizen Roosevelt Goes after ‘The Chief’
Next up for the Roosevelt treatment was publisher William Randolph Hearst. Mr. Hearst—known as “the Chief†to his many staff writers—was a lifelong Democrat who initially supported FDR in 1932 but increasingly soured to the New Deal around the middle of Roosevelt’s first term.
With any mention of Big Bad Bill Hearst, some overdue words of correction are needed to address the festering myths circulated by his contemporary adversaries as well as their surviving heirs in corporate media. Both groups hold congenital disgust for independent publishing that cannot be squared with reality.
A good read for anyone interested in this great American icon is the 2000 biography The Chief: The Life of William Randolph Hearst by David Nasaw. The book’s author generally favors a state-run economy and supports U.S. involvement in Europe’s War of the 1940s. Other than those standard features to be expected in big league publishing, the 600-page book is exhaustively researched, well written, and provides a fairly balanced treatment of the tensions between Hearst, Roosevelt and the many factions within their orbits.
Throughout his life, Hearst and his impressive chain of newspapers in at least 18 major cities and other media outlets took on powerful businesses and politicians with what often seemed like reckless abandon. His estimated 20 million readers during his mid-1930s peak loved him for it. The corporate oligarchs and their political serfs despised him. So did rabid New Dealers, as did the many partisan publishers that were either attached to one political party (like Joseph Pulitzer had been) or devoted to power (like the New York Times and Washington Post). And war enthusiasts of both Global Bloodbaths wanted Hearst to be hog-tied and thrown into a barbecue pit.
One example of Hearst’s fearless nature involves his papers’ reporting before and during World War I. The Republican pro-war New York Tribune ran hit pieces in six successive Sunday editions from April to June 1918 denouncing Hearst for his alleged disloyalty, relying on a tally of unpatriotic articles promoted by state and federal officials. According to The Chief’s author, Mr. Nasaw, each of the six anti-Hearst articles in the New York Tribune was preceded by a boxed scorecard:
Since the United States entered the war [in April 1917] the Hearst papers have printed:
74 – attacks on our allies
17 – instances of defense or praise of Germany
63 – pieces of antiwar propaganda
1 – deletion of a Presidential proclamation
Total 155
Hearst was among the few publishers resisting English and French propaganda stories of German atrocities in Belgium before U.S. entry to the war. During America’s intervention, his conservative press opponents went to Washington to work with the U.S. Attorney General in 1918 to put Hearst out of business on charges of “treason.†The bogus claims were eventually dropped for lack of evidence. (The Chief pages 243, 268-270)
Probably the best summation of Hearst’s character comes early in the book based on a private letter from Winston Churchill to his wife after a 1929 meeting with the Chief in Los Angeles. Mr. Churchill viewed Hearst as “simple†but remarked on his “complete indifference to public opinion, a strong liberal and democratic outlook, a 15 million daily circulation [at the time], oriental hospitalities, extreme personal courtesy†and other mostly amenable qualities. What’s surprising is that Churchill—a career war hawk—had every reason to dislike Hearst for his vigorous opposition towards U.S. coming to England’s rescue in WW I.
So what were Hearst’s politics? He was very much for international economic cooperation (including with Soviet Russia and Socialist Germany), but opposed open warfare with either. He was pro-labor when business had all the power and pro-business when federalized unions turned violent in the mid-1930s. Hearst believed strongly in law and order, initially favoring alcohol prohibition (as did FDR) then switching to the “wet†side when organized crime flourished in the late 1920s. He strongly opposed Roosevelt’s National Recovery Act industrial cartels but supported job-killing government make-work “relief†programs until at least 1935 when patronage abuses became rampant. Overall, Hearst was intense in his opinions but usually more practical than ideological.
If you happened to be a Marxist college professor radicalizing your students, a corrupt business tycoon seeking political favor, or a lying government official reneging on campaign promises—and Hearst’s reporters found out, as they often did—your life was going to be unpleasant for quite a while. Which is to say, Hearst made some powerful enemies.
In the case of Hearst’s wisely abandoning the disastrous New Deal, Roosevelt’s ranks of minions and collaborators would never forgive him. A common claim holds that after his endorsed candidate, FDR, took office in 1933 the Hearst newspapers suddenly “moved far to the right.†In this case, that oft-repeated “far right†comment was dropped into Wikipedia’s History of New York City (1898–1945), haphazardly footnoted to the book above. The possibility that Hearst (like many other proponents of individual liberty) was the steady hand and it was actually Roosevelt who had shifted the country far to the left escapes consideration in mainstream circles.
Perhaps the biggest ongoing farce regarding the villainous portrait of William Randolph Hearst is how his aggressive criticism of America’s entry into both World Wars gets brushed aside—totally ignored—with trite exaggerations about the publisher’s youthful exuberance during America’s brief 1898 war against Spain in Cuba. What’s most absurd about that whole affair—usually embellished with the legend of Hearst supposedly saying “I’ll furnish the warâ€â€”is the raw chutzpah of those leveling the charges. In most cases, the Latter-Day Peaceniks now wringing their hands over some century-old reporting before a brief war in Cuba are also the zombie-like death merchants who lied us into much bigger and permanently debilitating wars. And the Hearst critics are still proud of their own war-mongering!
Which brings us back to That Man in the White House. Roosevelt had been watching Hearst closely from around 1934 when his National Recovery Administration was broiling the country. In the Fall of 1934, FDR instructed his Secretary of the Treasury, Henry Morgenthau, to have the IRS dig through the tax returns of Hearst and his vast publishing enterprise as a weapon to hold in his back pocket. The author of The Chief says Roosevelt never used this sledge hammer, so I take that to be correct. But Roosevelt didn’t stop with attempted tax extortion.
Throughout 1935, Hearst had been exercising his First Amendment right to criticize the New Deal’s bureaucratic excesses and persistently high unemployment, which infuriated the sensitive aristocrat in the White House. By March 1936:
the president had signaled that it was “open season†on Hearst by ridiculing him, by name, during a press conference. Asked if he had clamped a censorship on his administration, the president, Newsweek reported, “snapped back his answer: Preposterous! The correspondent must have read that in a Hearst paper!†(The Chief page 520)
This crude effort to stir his base to action did not go unnoticed. Democrat Senator Hugo Black, “a zealous and effective New Deal loyalist†was already chairing a commission to go on a hunting expedition through private telegrams of Hearst and anyone else who might impede Roosevelt’s progress. The 2017 Reason article provides a good accounting of the Black Committee tactics:
Over a nearly three-month period at the end of 1935, FCC and Black Committee staffers searched great stacks of telegrams in Western Union’s D.C. office. Operating with virtually no restriction, they read the communications of sundry lobbyists, newspaper publishers, and conservative political activists as well as every member of Congress. Writing to Black, one investigator stated that they had gone through “35,000 to 50,000 per day.†Various newspapers and members of Congress later estimated that staffers had examined some five million telegrams over the course of the investigation.
Of course, this was an unethical and probably illegal invasion of privacy, not to mention an assault on the Constitution. The results of the dragnet were used by New Dealers to openly attack Bill Hearst and other anti-New Deal newspapers. Facing the threat of lawsuit from Hearst and criticism from ACLU and finally some pro-Roosevelt press, the Black Committee disbanded in mid-1936. Team Roosevelt got away with a public relations hand slap. Senator Black would be rewarded by FDR the next year with a Supreme Court appointment. The lengthy Wikipedia page for Hugo Black does not contain a single word of this disgraceful affair or mention Bill Hearst once. Ms. Winfield’s FDR media book entirely omits the Black Committee episode.
For the remainder of Roosevelt’s reign, William Randolph Hearst would be tarred as evil incarnate. And few dared to challenge that assessment. New Deal supporters would organize protests, write pamphlets and books, and even produce the 1941 smear film Citizen Kane to drive home their point. The sole intent of that “classic†movie was to demonize the most prominent surviving publisher who dared to criticize their Leader for Life and his ridiculous economic, social and military schemes.
Scores of partisans in media and academics still pretend that libelous movie—produced by a socialist and prominent FDR campaigner, Orson Welles—was innocent entertainment. The enormous Wikipedia page on Citizen Kane praises the work as “Considered by many… to be the greatest film ever made.†The Wiki writers make no mention of any political affiliation of the producer Welles or any possible motive for him disliking Hearst. At the time of its release, Kane was a cinematic flop despite ample free buzz from media admirers. Everyone knew Welles was a left-wing activist in contempt of Hearst and in support of Roosevelt. One of many books to confirm Welles’s political activism is Orson Welles Interviews, edited by Mark Estrin, which states:
Welles had been active in American political life for some time, speaking at anti-Fascist [sic] rallies as early as 1938 and campaigning intensively for Franklin Roosevelt’s re-election in 1944.
The political viewpoints and motivations of Mr. Welles seem to be much more intriguing than any mainstream journalist (and even The Chief) has been willing to admit. But these views are largely beyond the scope of this essay.
After decades of a hard-charging press baron making many powerful and unhinged enemies, Citizen Kane would be their underhanded way to slap back. Long after Hearst died in 1951, movie “experts†and academic malcontents would suddenly discover how “great†this piece of partisan artwork actually was. People who knew the real background were now retired or dead. And the story of a rotten man of “yellow journalism†made for a nice affirmation for the pliable scribes of modern stenography.
During his prolific life Bill Hearst enraged socialists, big business and war hawks alike during his more than 60-year news career. As a result of doing his job and being surrounded by too many lesser peers in the news business, very little positive material can be found in his defense. This is too bad, since Hearst was a fiercely independent defender of the little guy, even if his economic understanding was a bit rough at times, and his respect for authority was what one might expect from a college punk-rock band.
Between Hearst and Roosevelt, the Chief was usually the bigger man. And he paid a much bigger price.
Mr. Hyde Park Cuts Again
Another press target of FDR was John Flynn, author and columnist for the New Republic and other periodicals. One of Flynn’s most popular books, The Roosevelt Myth, is now available online at Unz Review. Flynn was much more the academic thinker and considerably less of a street-brawler than Hearst or McCormick.
Yet Roosevelt’s antipathy for Flynn—daring to criticize the late-1930s war scare in another publication—prompted him to write to the editor of the Yale Review magazine and suggest that Flynn “should be barred hereafter from the columns of any presentable daily paper, monthly magazine or national quarterly, such as the Yale Review. (Raimondo page 114)
There is some debate on whether or not Roosevelt directly influenced the New Republic in their decision to axe one of their top columnists, Flynn, after five years with the magazine. But Roosevelt wanted Flynn silenced. He got caught writing his directions as such to another editor. And Flynn was fired from the New Republic in 1938.
But Mr. Flynn was fortunate and quickly got hired by the Chicago Tribune. Many others facing the wrath of the New Dealers were not so lucky.
A Pox on the ‘Radio Priest’
With Hearst and McCormick damaged and Flynn and Carter fired, political hit men in the New Deal politburo kept plotting ahead on their mission. After years of organized smears from partisan belligerents, the popular liberal radio personality, Charles Coughlin, was finally run off the airwaves for daring to speak out against the rising militarism and other issues he saw as troubling America. The intolerance of FDR and other pro-war agitators of the time arguably provides the most relevance to this ugly chapter of American history. The back story of FDR’s orchestrated censorship campaign against Coughlin warrants a closer look too, as nearly all of it has been omitted from government civics lessons.
Starting on the air in 1926, within less than a decade the passionate and independent Catholic priest had built an estimated audience of 30 million listeners—easily the biggest in the nation—to his one-hour Sunday afternoon show. In comparison on audience size, with more than double the U.S. population today, the leading talk-radio host Rush Limbaugh peaked out at only 20 million weekly listeners.
To avoid the trap of selective outrage (ubiquitous in any analysis of Coughlin), comparisons with modern talk radio and one of his subsequent peers are again useful. The flag-waving hyper-nationalism in broadcasting today is so over-the-top that when conservative FoxNews commentator, Sean Hannity, urges President Trump to “bomb the hell out of†Iran, it barely raises eyebrows. Hannity, too, claims to be a religious man and added “We have the greatest military, thank God, on the face of this earth.†Another leading voice of AM talk radio, Mark Levin, an accomplished author and legal scholar who identifies as a Jew, uses his FCC microphone privileges to sling childish insults at his political opponents and spreads anti-Muslim paranoia on a daily basis. Let’s not forget the atheist radio hawk, Rush Limbaugh, who promotes breathless adoration of the federal military and all its travails. I won’t even bother to cite any of the vile scapegoating that spews continuously from the mouths of left-wing extremists throughout cable news. As far as race-baiting goes, Mr. Coughlin’s supporters never rioted or burned down one, much less 110 cities, in protest as did the followers of a sainted Street Preacher of the 1960s.
Charles Coughlin was at times sanctimonious, but never approached the level of depravity of the leading dissidents of the 1960s or today. During his career, Coughlin was very well informed on foreign policy and also a fairly serious cultural thinker (by New Deal standards) who earned the respect of his broad middle-class audience. According to this harsh review of historian Alan Brinkley’s 1982 book Voices of Protest on Coughlin and Huey Long, “only the faintest undercurrent of religious prejudice can be found in the rhetoric of [Coughlin’s] prime political years.†(Mr. Brinkley’s slanted treatment of Coughlin and Long—denouncing both men in callous terms throughout the book, while offering polite excuses for their censorious opponents—only makes his subjects appear more innocent.)
Another important executive characteristic consistently overlooked by scholars involves the vastly different approaches to media relations between FDR and his predecessor. Father Charles Coughlin and William Randolph Hearst were both highly critical of incumbent Herbert Hoover (and supportive of the challenger Roosevelt) during the 1932 election. But the Republican president apparently never used political power to harm his press critics. The coddled aristocrat, Franklin Roosevelt, took a less forgiving approach—especially with Coughlin and Hearst.
Throughout his public career, Coughlin embraced a standard liberal agenda of “social justice,†nationalized banking, politicized unions, and protecting local merchants from corporate domination. These views were blended with more conservative ideas of criticizing New Deal bureaucracies, resisting international wars and railing against Communism, although his coercive social policies shared significant congruence with socialist goals.
Commonly known as the “Radio Priest,†Coughlin had first come to fame in the 1920s by denouncing a group of white nationalists in his hometown of Detroit. In the late 1930s, he witnessed another assortment of mostly atheist political activists promoting union and political violence at home and wide-scale military bloodshed abroad, and once again sounded a (far more nuanced and cautious) warning. But the folks he attacked in the 1920s had nowhere near the media clout of the socialists and ethnocentric crusaders who had achieved significant political power in the U.S. by the 1930s. Making matters worse, Coughlin increasingly strayed off the path of safe political discourse—particularly after 1938 when his career was threatened by organized Jewish groups and grandstanding Gentile war-enthusiasts. He also dared to criticize the emperor in the White House, usually for not being progressive enough.
Franklin Roosevelt—a man with virtually zero accomplishments outside of politics, who grew increasingly obsessed over his skillfully manufactured public image—never took criticism well. By mid-1934 his administration was quietly working behind the scenes to undermine Coughlin’s ability to stay on the air, viewing the Radio Priest (still a New Deal supporter) as too unpredictable. (Brinkley page 127)
Then in January 1935, Coughlin energized his listeners to bombard Capitol Hill against Roosevelt’s nearly successful attempt to drag America into the quagmire of a World Court. New Dealers fumed at this last-minute, highly publicized defeat. Over the next few years, the liberal priest from Detroit completely broke with the Roosevelt regime on both domestic and foreign policy. With the help of pro-FDR federal broadcasters, Coughlin was bitterly attacked and eventually kicked off the air in 1940 and subsequently tarred as a “filthy goy†and the “wrong kind of socialist,†if you understand modern political slurs.
After an avalanche of abuse, Wikipedia is somewhat helpful in filling in a few gaps. Using the trick of passive reporting to exonerate the aggressors, they state:
After the outbreak of World War II in Europe in September 1939, Coughlin’s opposition to the repeal of a neutrality-oriented arms embargo law resulted in additional and more successful efforts to force him off the air.
Although it was FDR and pro-war extremists pulling the strings here, Wikipedia makes it seem like “Coughlin’s opposition†forced his own censoring. Wikipedia is more direct a few sentences later, stating:
After the devastating Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, and the U.S. declaration of war in December 1941… The Roosevelt Administration stepped in again. On April 14, 1942, U.S. Attorney General Francis Biddle wrote a letter to the Postmaster General, Frank Walker, and suggested revoking the second-class mailing privilege of [Coughlin’s newspaper] Social Justice, which would make it impossible for Coughlin to deliver the papers to his readers.
The final act of FDR’s retaliation succeeded in silencing Father Coughlin and his loyal fans for good. Rather than acknowledge this act of political despotism by Democratic royalty, most historians (and neo-con admirers as well) choose to “punch down†on the memory of a defrocked radio host rather than stand up to concentrated executive power. Between Coughlin and Roosevelt, Harvard professor Alan Brinkley’s assessment of one of the men got it right: “As the years passed and his popularity grew, a strain of megalomania wore away his self-restraint until finally his excesses destroyed him.â€
As is common for books written in the early 1980s (when the Fairness Doctrine was still in effect and State adoration completely dominated mass media) the subsidized historian could only speak harshly of the weak. That Man who nearly “destroyed†the entire country managed to escape Brinkley’s analysis unscathed.
In reality, Charles Coughlin’s biggest failings were more fundamental. Coughlin’s lack of private-sector (i.e., “real world†or “serviceâ€) experience, absence of any significant ground support movement, and belief that positive social “uplift†could be achieved through a microphone (or a book or article, for that matter) all spelled doom for his highly energetic efforts. Of course, none of those critiques justified the actions of the New Deal gestapo.
The Darkening Mood of 1939-1941
American political culture during the Great Depression was bad enough in times of peace. But during the 1939-40 covert war buildup by FDR, professional life for an anti-New Deal journalist or filmmaker became miserable.
A mere one day after Pearl Harbor, Roosevelt launched another military action—this time in California. In a June 2018 essay by Ron Unz on the Great Purge of the 1940s, he writes:
Walt Disney was also the only high-ranking Hollywood figure perched squarely within the anti-war camp. And the day after the surprise Japanese attack, hundreds of U.S. troops seized control of Disney Studios, allegedly in order to help defend California from Japanese forces located thousands of miles away, with the military occupation continuing for the next eight months.
Disney immediately complied, producing absurdities like “The Thrifty Pig,†which cast the role of Big Bad Wolf as a Nazi, and other pro-war films. During the war, Roosevelt would frighten the public with vast military hardware parades that one might expect from North Korea or the old Soviet Union. People were bombarded with non-stop propaganda posters and movies encouraging people to enjoy wartime rationing, glamorizing America’s military heroics and depicting the enemy as sub-human. All of Hollywood cooperated. All of America shipped their eligible boys to the battlefront, sent their wives to the factories, bought patriotic war bonds and looked to Washington for salvation.
If Roosevelt’s New Deal planners excelled at anything, it was planning. This would be an all-out war against two very formidable foes. U.S. Central Command needed absolute obedience on the battlefield and unwavering support at home. A servile media was always FDR’s preference; now he had the perfect excuse. In the years immediately prior to Pearl Harbor, it was just a matter of arranging the chess pieces for maximum chance of victory.
The Sage of Baltimore Goes Silent; Celebrity Aviator Gets Shot Down
One of the last sturdy knights (or so it would seem) remaining on the anti-New Deal chessboard was voluminous author and syndicated columnist for the Baltimore Sun, H.L. Mencken. As we’ve seen, by 1940, the mood in America was so grim that newspaper publishers fully understood the message: go along with New Deal economic ruination and military intervention… or expect a public thrashing.
Mencken had always been a fierce defender of individual liberties and against mass political movements. As an independent thinker in a time of political conformity, during the 1930s his critics were increasingly labeling him as “right-wing.†A summation of Mencken and another libertarian writer, Albert Jay Nock (blacklisted in 1941) and their alleged “drift†to the right, Murray Rothbard wrote in 1962:
The great individualist Albert Jay Nock has written that, while in the 1920’s he was generally considered a flaming “radical,†and in the 1930’s as a bitter “reactionary,†his political philosophy remained, in these decades, exactly the same. The same might be said of his friend Mencken, who also remained, throughout, an individualist and a libertarian. In the 1920’s, Mencken directed his fire against the tariff and other special privileges to favored business groups, against laws and edicts against free speech and other personal liberties, and especially against the monstrous tyranny of Prohibition. In the 1930’s, Mencken directed his major attacks against the major threat to liberty of that era: the New Deal.
A 2002 profile of Mencken in The Atlantic concluded that “Nothing seemed to matter more to him than uncensored self-expression.†This common view does not explain Mencken’s abrupt departure from the public scene around 1940; I can’t find anyone who attempts to explain it. By the start of U.S. entry into World War II, Mencken had continuously written for newspapers or magazines for over 40 years.
Yet around 1940, the opinionated Sage of Baltimore went into self-imposed hibernation to work on writing books. These would be autobiographical books—Happy Days (1940), Newspaper Days (1941), and Heathen Days (1943)—that lacked any of his prior fury towards political shenanigans.
Mencken’s abrupt change of mood simply makes no sense. And the lack of scholarship on this crucial period in Mencken’s and America’s history also strains credibility. After all, this was one of the country’s most popular writers, a man about whom dozens of books and hundreds of articles have since been written.
The early 1940s was a time period of crushing U.S. media intolerance. In September 1941, a popular spokesman for the anti-interventionist movement, aviator Charles Lindbergh, found himself condemned and outcast after talking at an America First rally in Iowa. This now infamous anti-war speech (captured at length in Wikipedia) acknowledged Jewish “persecution†in Germany and correctly noted “the British, the Jewish, and the Roosevelt Administration†as three groups “pressing this country toward war.†(Subsequent tales about Lindbergh “singling out†Jews are simply false.) But open dialogue was the last thing on the pro-war agenda.
Lindbergh’s sober assessment that war in Europe would be devasting to Jews has been forgotten in the rush to condemn the last great voice of moderation in the 1940s. But dozens of photos from early-war European labor camps made available by religious scholar Nathanael Kapner (compared to the endless displays of gruesome late-war photos promoted by Hollywood and federal broadcasters) suggest the aviator was once again correct. The evident conclusion that Allied terror bombing of German civilians made food scarce for everyone has been assiduously censored by pro-war belligerents ever since.
During this same period, editor for the liberal Nation magazine, Oswald Garrison Villard was “blacklisted†and “lost his editorship as a direct consequence of his intransigent opposition to the war.†(Raimondo page 133)
Yet, Mencken—who turned 60 in September 1940—simply “retired†from the strenuous job of… opinion writing? (“retired†quote from Raimondo page 134, with no hint of curiosity)
These were ugly times for free speech. And the Roosevelt machine—as it had shown with McCormick, Hearst, Coughlin and others—was eager to squash all opposition. And print publications were American liberty’s last line of defense.
Pro-FDR media historian, Betty Houchin Winfield, recounts that as of 1940, NBC and CBS (who were pro-war and pro-welfare as she fails to mention) occupied a commanding “86 percent of the total night-time radio power in the country.†And the desperate man in the White House was still smarting from a 1938 mid-term election that saw Republicans gain 81 seats in the House, 8 seats in the Senate, and 13 new governorships. (Winfield pages 110 and 139)
In the face of this daunting opposition, I suppose it’s possible that the literary giant of “uncensored self-expression†voluntarily retreated into the shadows to go write books about himself. But I’m thinking there’s more to the story.
Whatever the motive for Mencken’s sudden departure from journalism, the reason seems more complex than the trite description offered in Wikipedia: during the 1940s, Mencken “ceased writing for The Baltimore Sun for several years.†The executed rebel “ceased breathing†makes as much sense.
Ten hours of searching history books and online accounts returned similar vagueness, which fits with the larger pattern. Nearly all mainstream media accounts of other documented New Deal censorship consistently downplay Roosevelt’s harsh treatment of press critics. So I’m thinking some sloppy reporting may be at work here, or possibly willful omissions of embarrassing FDR activity. I remain hopeful that Unz Review commenters may possess some better answers.
The Demise of the Saturday Evening Post
Once the sharpest minds and passionate voices of political discourse were severely tarnished or entirely removed from public access, it was easier for New Dealers to clamp down on any remaining pockets of resistance. One of the last such voices of reason in the mainstream press was the Saturday Evening Post.
During the 1920s and 30s, the Saturday Evening Post had been America’s most popular weekly magazine. The Post accomplished this by finding and developing the best fiction and non-fiction writers and illustrators in the country (including Jack London, Garet Garrett, Norman Rockwell and dozens of other household names of the era) and by appealing to classic American values. This was “a culture that valued achievement, hard work, self-improvement, independence, self-discipline, and the entrepreneurial spirit†as Old Right media historian and longtime AntiWar.com editor, the late Justin Raimondo once described it.
Two decent books that provide contemporary insight to American culture during the Roosevelt years are collections of Garet Garrett’s articles originally published in the weekly magazine. The first book is Salvos Against the New Deal: Selections from the Saturday Evening Post 1933-1940 and the second is Defend America First: The Antiwar Editorials of the Saturday Evening Post 1939-1942. Both books are edited by journalist Bruce Ramsey of the Seattle Times and were published in 2007 and 2003, respectively. Once again, the Radio Act of 1927, the Communications Act of 1934 and federal broadcasting controls are not mentioned at all in either book.
But the detailed history (particularly on union militancy, NRA collusion and agricultural follies) within both collections gives a glimpse of what mainstream reporting looked like at the time—and it most definitely was not liberal or some version of the right-wing Neanderthals found foraging at AM talk radio and FoxNews. If anything, the articles in both collections go to excessive lengths to present long-winded, intellectually sanitized murmurings against the total state; this style seems to reflect conservative meekness throughout the Great Depression. In hindsight, it’s amazing that Roosevelt would bother to censor a magazine of such mild critiques, particularly for their insipid 1939-1942 anti-war editorials.
Nevertheless, the Saturday Evening Post was a popular fixture of middle-America that Roosevelt viewed as an impediment to his glory. Over the prior two generations, the magazine had successfully labored to establish a refined pedigree of its own in conservative cultural commentary. From 1899 to 1936, the Post was led by the steady hand of its editor George Horace Lorimer, a man of sound economic and legal principles with a healthy distain for foreign military adventurism. (The prior Wikipedia link misses all of that and provides only a photo and basic shell outline.)
After Lorimer’s retirement in late 1936, editorial direction fell to Wesley Stout, who held similar anti-New Deal views as Lorimer. But the Post’s owner, Curtis Publishing Company, was growing increasingly uneasy with standing against the angry tides of collectivism and militarism rising in New York and Washington.
After much private and public acrimony, in 1942, a pro-government delinquent named Ben Hibbs was installed to pacify New Dealers and minimize attacks on the magazine, which were becoming unbearable. Under the new pliant Post leadership, a state-controlled economy and European warfare suddenly seemed quite reasonable. The only thing left was to purge the remaining opposition.
Economics columnist and author of 13 books, Garet Garrett was forced out within months, after twenty years of writing at the Post. So was editor Wesley Stout, another twenty-year veteran. In Stout’s 1971 obituary in the New York Times, the paper whitewashes this pivotal event as:
Mr. Stout resigned as editor of The Saturday Evening Post in 1942 because of what was termed “a firm but friendly disagreement with the Curtis Publishing Company on policy.â€
Again, we see the tell-tale use of passive language (“was termed†by whom?) in the above blurb. The reality, which NYT was not only aware of but also contributed to, was much less pleasant. By 1942, with Roosevelt’s achievement of dragging the U.S. into battle, the climate of fear and intolerance was so intense in American publishing that Garrett was blacklisted for the next two years. Along with other recently purged voices of liberty, they faced “harassment, vilification, and deprivation of livelihoods.†(Raimondo page 88)
Former Post editor from 1937-1942, Wesley Stout, who had brought the magazine to it all-time peak circulation (as NYT admits) would find work at the Chrysler Corporation in Detroit—a logical and voluntary career change in the narrative of the Times. Garrett finally found employment writing for a magazine of the National Industrial Conference Board, reaching a much smaller audience but avoiding the wrath of FDR and his loyal shock troops.
The full story of what had transpired would only come out over a decade later, in 1953, when Garrett’s most popular book was published. In Reclaiming the American Right (pages 92-93) Justin Raimondo provides more details on the period but the following passage captures the essence:
On the dust jacket of The People’s Pottage, we are told that Garrett’s Saturday Evening Post editorials “created much bitter controversy and caused the New Deal to threaten the life of that magazine.â€
With Lorimer dead and Garrett and Stout gone, the once-cherished magazine of Main Street U.S.A. could now safely appeal to the higher prerogatives of the publishing establishment. And the conversion didn’t take long.
The next year would see a face plant for the ages. But this too would be shrouded in journalistic folklore. The stupefying naivete of Norman Rockwell’s “Four Freedoms†oil paintings would be published in the Saturday Evening Post in 1943. In this popular series, the artist and magazine expressly catered to FDR’s launch of those platitudes in January 1941 during a State of the Union address. Roosevelt’s Four Freedoms debut was clairvoyantly 11 months before the “surprise†Japanese attack and would subsequently be used ad nauseum to boost public support for his long-anticipated military intervention on behalf of England and France.
In the war-time fog of state-sponsored patriotism during World War II, none were left in mass media or government to question the absurdity of a Commander in Chief—a man who distained free speech, preferred subsidized religion over the freely administered variety, despised free-market prosperity, and reveled in public fear-mongering—lecturing anyone on “essential human freedoms†that we must pursue “everywhere in the world.†And the weary public, across all political persuasions, devoured Rockwell’s and the Post’s soothing comforts with hopeless abandon.
Decades later, curators of the Saturday Evening Post would rationalize their prior disloyalty against the New Deal and make amends. Its managing editors issued a revealing article in 2017 titled “On the Side of Social Security: The Post argued for government assistance in 1952 after several years of opposition.â€
Another retrospective published in July 2019 celebrates the joys of arbitrary Thought Crime legislation and selective racial revenge, something the Post would have unequivocally opposed in its heyday. The puff piece is titled “The Civil Rights Act of 1964 Still Works for You: Proposed by President John F. Kennedy and delivered after his assassination, the Civil Rights Act of 1964 reckoned with the malignancy of discrimination.†The 2019 article forgot to mention the enormous economic progress of black Americans during the 1940s and 50s, which seriously undercuts the demand for federal skin-color legislation in the first place.
It’s barely worth mentioning what the Post’s view on World War II and subsequent military endeavors now entails. Suffice to say, FDR would have been proud.
Epilogue
Does New Deal history have any significance today? Let us count the ways.
For starters, the open celebration of an abusive tyrant—with a 12-year record of immense failure, media manipulation and lawless usurpations—should remove any doubt over the corruption of American institutions who have thoroughly whitewashed this vital period. Anyone not already convinced of the totalitarian inclinations of the original New Deal and its recent “green†reincarnation should think again.
On media controls, the pervasive hypocrisy of the education-media-entertainment industries couldn’t be more glittering. The same ones who cry foul over the slightest impediment to poor people voting for more welfare and their own freedom to slander at will, fully accept the total obstruction of FCC barriers that block over 99.9% of Americans from the powerful platforms of radio and television.
Populists and liberals who repeat the mantra about “six giant corporations controlling 90% of the media†entirely miss the point. Their longstanding support of political press interference created that disparity which they now abhor.
Even more bizarre is the conservative-libertarian wing of neo-con journals, talk radio, and FoxNews. Their silent approval of speech rationing indicates that once a person reaches the inner sanctum of broadcast privilege, any notion of “free market†spectrum access becomes obsolete.
Yet the question remains, what next?
Getting a clearer picture of the importance of independent journalism certainly helps, as does recognizing the inherent drawbacks of federal broadcast interference. It’s no coincidence that accurate reporting and robust analysis can, most often, only be found on internet sites free of government privilege—just as it was in newspapers and magazines up until the 1930s.
After that realization comes the reality check. America didn’t become great from people sitting around, writing and reading books and articles—whining about ancient grievances or launching bombastic comments—always assigning external blame for our vast cultural ills. You can only tell other people “you’re wrong†so many times before the message gets stale and the original goal becomes forgotten. Progress came from people who first got informed, then decided to invest their personal labors in hope of building a better tomorrow.
Is there a critical mass of Americans willing to perform the task of rebuilding functioning local institutions and eventually establishing a sane framework for the larger community? The answer to that question may determine if we ascend towards another Renaissance or drift into another long winter of discontent.
Steve Penfield Email: [email�protected]
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Who controls the media?
June 8, 2017 was the fiftieth anniversary of the deliberate attack upon the USS Liberty (GTR-5). Normally, on the fiftieth anniversary of any notable event in history, there is at least a mention of it in the mainstream media. Not so for the USS Liberty (GTR-5).
This, in itself is telling.
The USS Liberty was in international waters, clearly marked and identified by the Israelis as an American ship.
Lyndon Johnson initially refused help for the stricken ship as he did not want to embarrass an ally (Israel). The plan, all along was for Israel to attack the ship, leaving no survivors, and then to blame it on Egypt, thereby pulling America into a middle east war on the side of the Israelis. A brave sailor was able to reconnect an antenna, under fire, to get the message out that they were being attacked. Initially Lyndon Johnson refused to send help, but was forced to when the fleet got the distress call. All one has to do is look at the Lavon affair, among others, in which Israel always gets others to do its dirty work for them.
The subsequent investigation was whitewashed by none other than Admiral John S McCain (yes, John McCain’s daddy) with the captain of the ship being awarded the Medal of Honor not at the White House (which is protocol), but at an obscure Naval base.
The USS Liberty (GTR-5) sailors were scattered throughout the Navy and warned not to discuss the “incident†(actually an act of war) under pain of courts-martial.
The way the crew of the USS Liberty (GTR-5) was treated still stinks to this day.
The USS Liberty (GTR-5) is the most decorated ship in Naval history.
If I had my way, Israel would have been turned into a glass parking lot.
I dunno if this article ties into my concerns and all that drottle. We can see however that poor people who don’t have enough to eat will eventually rise up. We can see that capitalist governments Guage this to a tee as best they able with all their monied advantage. We can see that money buys super good killing machines to supress disent. We can see that sanctions themselves are bought and paid for by corporations to starve and deny medicines to the people who have very little voice, if any, in the future.
Have you ever noticed that war is always bought and financed by the rich against the poor? Always without exception against people with socialist ideas who wish to share in the profits of humanity instead of being miserable slaves to the filthy rich?
That is the disgrace of humanity. The cunning greedy rich tribes always rise to the top and sit there like cat shit on top of every wedding cake.
Unz mentioned in a podcast recently that one of the most famous liberals, I forget his name ironically enough, was suddenly purged in the 1930s because of his opposition to FDR. Just like that, one day he was gone. And this was a guy who was printed everywhere.
I think the concept of the “free press” is one the biggest hoaxes of our lifetimes. It never existed and it never will. Media always follows power.
Bravo and well done.
And let’s never forget the small “v” victims who were simply tainted for having been independent America Firsters even though they seemed to do alright for themselves.
Ayn Rand spent her own money, what little of it she had, writing and publishing pamphlets and anti-New Deal pieces before Pearl Harbor. Moneyed conservatives never forgave her. Gore Vidal was slimed early and often for simply being the head of an America First group at his high school… again before December 7, 1941. After which he joined the Army at 17 and got a disability for his trouble.
Saddest was Lillian Gish, silent movie star whose association with H=John T. Flynn caused her to be unemployable by the major studios for awhile, and might even be the reason her memory is hounded even now.
Patriots were driven underground early. By the end of WWII, Germany and Japan was beaten. But the USA was never free again either.
What a shame!
The author has a very strong, completely valid & objective argument against FDR & his persistent, obsessive attacks on press freedoms. Goebbels redux
Unfortunately, this argument is constantly weakened by the author’s almost unhinged hatred for FDR & his New Deal (ND). The obscenity of the ND is just assumed. Everyone “agrees”.
FDR’s WWII initiatives are also similarly assumed.
Unfortunately, the author suffers from 20/20 hindsight. He can’t even begin to see events thru the eyes of FDR’s contemporaries.
I actually agree with the author re – FDR & his malignant skeeming to create a war & then get the US into it. I agree because …well … 20/20 hindsight, again.
Dear Mr. Penfield
thank you for this well-documented article.
My impression has been for some time that Rooseveltism was “A Tyranny Failed”, begining with a centrist imitation of Mussolini and the developing into a Leftist enterprise (albeit the Communist Party was marginalized).
The real miracle is: Why did they fail?
For a part, because of strong institutions. Roosevelt could not completely undermine the SCOTUS nor the bi-party elections (even if he had a say in what candidate the Republicans would chose against him).
But a second reason has been war policy, like represented by the Four Freedoms and Rockwell’s standard interpretation of them. Whatever FDR meant with the Four Freedoms and how much Rockwell may have lied about that – FDR recognized that he needed the Churches for his war and Rockwell used the Four Freedoms as a powerful plea for cultural conservatism and traditionalism: family, homeland, Christian religion – all the points that e.g. the Francfort School rallied against. In a way the backbone of the “Red Decade” was broken.
This has had enormous relevance for e.g. post-war German politics. When the occupation army began to collaborate with the German Catholics ant the centrist Protestants, a lot of leftist (Jewish and Atheist) officers were positively outraged and left their offices. On the other hand, this prepared the way for the reconciliation between the two peoples which mostly happened under the auspices of McCarthy and Eisenhower.
All this was of course not what Roosevelt had intended, but this may have been a case in which the (conservative) water defeated the (leftist) stone. (And perhaps Rockwell was not naive, but deliberately used an opening of the Overton window in order to smuggle conservatice counterband into the public consciousness.) The price for all that was historical dishonesty – an enduring embellishment of WWII and Roosevelt (in both countries) -, but perhaps this price was not too high.
Interesting piece full of names vaguely known to many but whose stories are not. Thank you, Steve Penfield. A meaningful contribution.
The themes in this article could actually constitute a two-parter, the first on FDR government suppression of opponents/dissidents and the second on proactive media influence by the FDR government. Both are the kinds of thing we might attribute to a fascist-leaning government, but it seems to me the latter is especially out of line with our Norman-Rockwellian Freedom of the Press self-image (that is, Americans instinctually recoil at the idea of a “state-controlled [or state-influenced] media”).
On the latter, I’d highlight this line:
That comes to 26 articles/day.
Which leads me to wonder, What percentage of the entirety of the New York Times‘ core ‘political’ coverage might this have constituted? (Recalling also that 1937 was peacetime.)
To make an estimate on this, we need to know the total number of articles the NYT ran per day, and a good estimate on what share were political — that is to say, news items that the FDR government might have cared about popular opinion on — vs. non-political news items (sports, weather, celebrity gossip, and the like).
The best estimate on total articles I can come up with, aided by Excel, is the NYT printed around 500 ‘articles’ per day in 1937, ranging from “blurb-length,” one-liner mini-articles (some no longer than a single tweets of today) to thousand-worders and up. (I derive this from the NYT archive for October 1937. The archive is in eight parts; Parts 1 to 7 have 2,000 articles each, the Part 8 has 1,345 articles, for a total of 15,345 for the month, divided by 31 days in October = 495 articles/day).
So going with that 500/day, what percentage were ‘political’ as defined above?
I took a sample of twenty-five articles from the NYT October 1937 list (see headlines below), which I would classify as follows:
– 17 as not politically sensitive (e.g., “Storm Damage Heavy in Cuba,” Oct. 3, 1937);
– 3.5 as politically sensitive domestic news items (e.g., “HILLMAN CAUTIONS LABOR ON POLITICS; Warns Brooklyn Rally of 1,000 Against Dropping Aims to Win More Offices”);
– 4.5 as politically sensitive foreign news items (e.g., “NAZI PARADE STIRS LONDON; Extra Police Assigned to Line of March–Mosley to Speak”)
–> Total politically sensitive stories at 8/25, or 32% of this sample.
If this 32% is approximately correct for the typical day, it would mean 160 (+/-) ‘political’ articles per day; returning to the Dr. McCamy’s finding that 26 articles/day were directly from the FDR government, this would then mean, allowing for a wide margin of error, that 10-25% of (the contents of) ‘political’ articles were effectively directly inserted by the FDR government in peacetime by 1937.
The impact would be stronger still (than this 15-20% suggests) as many of these 160 (+/-) political articles/day were very short, a sentence or two or three, probably usually not the kind of thing a government would bother with, and in any case not the headliners. If counting only substantive articles, then, we could bump up “FDR government articles / total political articles” further. So this was more significant in scale than many would imagine.
____________
The sample articles used to derive the “32% political” calculation are as follows (from Oct. 1937, Part 8, started at a random point and chose the 25 that followed):
Interesting information about some of FDR’s tyrannical actions which establishment historians tend to ignore or justify.
Finally, a breath of fresh air here! Great to see the names of the great Mencken, Nock and Garrett all mentioned in the same article for once. [An unusual occurrence at Unz.com as far as I can tell] . All names hated and vilified by the anti-freedom, anti-free market, anti-free speech left and right wing uber statists who hang out here. [Fuck em all]
Steve Penfield says :“America did have a mostly free and independent press until the rise of broadcasting in the 1920s. ”
Debatable at best. If you research the passage of the Alien and Sedition Act [1798], its effects, and [for example] Jeffersons written opinions on it , you will find that speech suppression [of the press]was one of its “finest” features. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alien_and_sedition_act
So FDR and associated’s actions were “merely” a continuation and expansion of that 1798 Acts’ anti- 1st amendment provisions.
As Nock said: “Taking the State wherever found, striking into its history at any point, one sees no way to differentiate the activities of its founders, administrators and beneficiaries from those of a professional-criminal class.”
Steve Penfield says : “Even more bizarre is the conservative-libertarian wing of neo-con journals, talk radio, and FoxNews. Their silent approval of speech rationing indicates that once a person reaches the inner sanctum of broadcast privilege, any notion of “free market†spectrum access becomes obsolete.”
Anyone who does not understand that all of the TV MSM channels are nothing more than full on government propaganda outlets and nothing more [ including Fox] , as are practically all newspapers and magazines, or, as Zappa put it : ” the media is nothing more than the entertainment wing of the military/industrial complex” [ or words to that effect] , is naive at best, and a moron at worst,and usually, its the latter of the two.
And so it goes…
regards, onebornfree
Everything we were taught in school was a Big Lie. Great American History.
Working backwards: 1984(today): FDR; Hoover; Progressivism; Pietists: Unitarians; Puritans.
F*** ’em all!
Steve Penfield says “Yet the question remains, what next?”
Here you go: “With Little Fanfare, William Barr Formally Announces Orwellian Pre-Crime Program “:
“Last Wednesday, U.S. Attorney General William Barr issued a memorandum to all U.S. attorneys, law enforcement agencies and top ranking Justice Department officials announcing the imminent implementation of a new “national disruption and early engagement program†aimed at detecting potential mass shooters before they commit any crime……”:
Regards, onebornfree
Long story short – the gov’t is made up of scumbags that will curtail your natural rights at every opportunity to enrich themselves and their hangers on.
What one should take away from this article has little to do with free speech directly. No one gives ‘licensing’ a second thought as though it’s the natural order of things. It’s not.
When the horse was the popular mode of transportation, there were no license plates on the rear end of a horse. When motor vehicles were invented, gov’t decide it was time for licensing the ability to travel on almost anything more convenient than walking. Ask yourself if you forget how to drive every year. Ask yourself what real purpose does having license plates on a car serve. Why is it you have to pay a registration fee for your vehicle annually? These are just money making schemes to steal from the public and to provide jobs to what would otherwise be welfare recipients.
Why does an electrician need a license? How about a plumber, doctor, pilot, etc? How does a state sponsored license guarantee competency? Didn’t the electrician get trained and pass certification tests as part of the educational process? Didn’t the doctor pass all the medical boards? What exactly does the gov’t imprimatur called a ‘license’ serve except to stifle competition and increase costs to the public? Licensing is the state approved cartelization of certain industries to provide them with above average incomes. ‘Collective Bargaining’ is a defacto license to commit state approved extortion so a certain small segment of the population can demand pay and benefits that the free market itself wouldn’t provide. We all pay for those above average perks when we purchase a union made vehicle.
Licensing is a ‘title of nobility’ that the founders deemed inappropriate. Licensing is graft and corruption written into law.
onebornfree says: “With Little Fanfare, William Barr Formally Announces Orwellian Pre-Crime Program “:
Sorry, I forgot to include a link: https://www.activistpost.com/2019/10/with-little-fanfare-william-barr-formally-announces-orwellian-pre-crime-program.html
Regards, onebornfree
Regarding the motivation of Mencken. I have read all or most of his works. My vague recollection is that he wished to spare the Baltimore Sun any damage by the Roosevelt administration as he had already been targeted during the anti-German hysteria of Wilson’s WW1. He viewed resistance as futile and pointless. These observations are, I think, within his own works.
Great and informative article, but the author failed to go back far enough in history. The lock down of the press started with the very first Republican(nothing more than the re-branded Whig Party), one Abe Lincoln.
https://potus-geeks.livejournal.com/788857.html
Establishment historians favor tyranny–as long as their “team” is in charge.
Glad to see the article discussing Nock and Mencken–their writings are always interesting, often amusing, and sometimes amazing.
Current “journalists” are just primitive propagandists pushing the narratives sanctioned by their bosses–totally useless and an embarrassment to their trade.
RoatanBill says: “Long story short – the gov’t is made up of scumbags that will curtail your natural rights at every opportunity to enrich themselves and their hangers on.”
“Because they are all ultimately funded via both direct and indirect theft [taxes], and counterfeiting [via central bank monopolies], all governments are essentially, at their very cores, 100% corrupt criminal scams which cannot be “reformed”,”improved”, nor “limited” in scope, simply because of their innate criminal nature.” onebornfree
“Taking the State wherever found, striking into its history at any point, one sees no way to differentiate the activities of its founders, administrators and beneficiaries from those of a professional-criminal class.†Albert J. Nock
“Government is a disease masquerading as its own cure†Robert LeFevere
“Why should any self-respecting citizen endorse an institution grounded on thievery? For that is what one does when one votes. If it be argued that we must let bygones be bygones, see what can be done toward cleaning up the institution of the State so that it might be useful in the maintenance of orderly existence, the answer is that it cannot be done; you cannot clean up a brothel and yet leave the business intact. We have been voting for one “good government†after another, and what have we got?” Frank Chodorov, Out of Step (1962)
Regards, onebornfree
The MSM in the ZUS is zionist owned and acts as a cheerleader for zionist wars and false flags and zionist subversion and destruction of the American way of life, there is no free press in America, what we have is a police state that makes Orwells 1984 look like a Sunday school picnic.
SHARED !
Agree, see these books Blood in the Water by Joan Mellen and Remember the Liberty by Phillip Nelsen and both of these books have contributions by survivors of the attack on the Liberty and both can be had on amazon.
Johnny Walker Read says: “The lock down of the press started with the very first Republican(nothing more than the re-branded Whig Party), one Abe Lincoln.”
I’m afraid that it started even before that- in the very first administration, in fact,via the Alien and Sedition Act [1798]. See my post [9], above.
Regards, onebornfree
I’m surprised to hear this ….. this was written by E. Malynski in 1929 regarding the US entry into WW I –
(E. Malynski: La Démocratie victorieuse)
“With Little Fanfare, William Barr Formally Announces Orwellian Pre-Crime Program “:
: https://www.activistpost.com/2019/10/with-little-fanfare-william-barr-formally-announces-orwellian-pre-crime-program.htm
Here’s an idea: why not immediately jail all of the scumbags who wrote this bill, and all of the scumbags who vote for its passage into law , BEFORE said scumbags commit any more crimes against humanity?
How’s that for effective use of “pre-crime” legislation?
Regards, onebornfree
Chad23456 says:“My vague recollection is that he wished to spare the Baltimore Sun any damage by the Roosevelt administration as he had already been targeted during the anti-German hysteria of Wilson’s WW1. “
That was my impression from reading Mencken, too. And I haven’t even read most of his stuff -mostly just “The Minority Report”,[ my pesronal favorite to date] and “A Mencken Chrestomathy” .
Regards, onebornfree
I get the feeling China is the experimental ground for future totalitarian control schemes. Any idiots who think China is some kind of positive alternative to JewSA are in for a rude awakening. Russia, Iran, and a few others are probably the only genuine independent holdouts in this world. China twiced cooperated with the Anglo-Americans against genuine rising powers such as Imperial Japan, and later the USSR after the Sino-Soviet split. Not to mention Jizzrael selling China weapons. China is a giant fraud of a nation.
Lincoln suspended habeas corpus during the civil war. He kept approximately 40K Americans in jails without trial during the war. Most were newspaper publishers editors and writers.
He didn’t want any news reports of defeats, wounded and disabled, or editorials expressing any ideas about the progress of the war than his own.
True. I just get tired of the “Lincoln Lies” and try and out them at every opportunity.
https://attackthesystem.com/2012/05/15/red-republicans-and-lincolns-marxists-marxism-in-the-civil-war/
“America did have a mostly free and independent press until the rise of broadcasting in the 1920s.”
I highly doubt it. When you look at the role of the press in the USS-Maine incident or the establishment of the Federal Reserve you must conclude that it was controlled by the same sinister powers long before the Great Depression. The role of freemasonry as auxiliary force for jewry is still very underrated among the so-called truth seekers.
Although Penfield’s article mentions the jews a few times, he could have done much more to stress the fact that all the mass media have been in control by jews or their stooges for a very long time.
All in all, this article is a limited hangout at best.
agree
As bad as FDR was, Wilson may have been worse. He shut down pretty much every German language newspaper in the U.S., threw Irish-American dissidents into prison, opened people’s private mail and allowed vigilante gangs to run around kidnapping people suspected of dodging the draft. What a terrible time to live in America. One commonality: it’s always the Democrats.
Looking back, “free press” has always been a scam inflicted upon the people by the social/political “elite.”
And before some come with the “common wisdom” that Hearst, who was deeply involved with the USS Maine incident, was some kind of “fascist”, I want to say, that this is as much true as Trump is a “fascist”. Both are stooges for jewish power.
agree
“I actually agree with …”
So, what’s your point, other than that you wanted the essay to be longer, covering the assumed “obscenity of the [New Deal and] FDR’s WWII initiatives, … to see events thru the eyes of FDR’s contemporaries”?
The article is about how mass media dissent was squelched.
Agree, David Rockefeller in the 1970’s sent his henchman Kissinger over to China to open up China’s slave labor to the US industrialists and thus began the deindustrialization of America as US industry was transplanted to China and unemployment in America skyrocketed , the actual true unemployment in the ZUS is around 21%.
Everything in the way of industry and high tech was made in the ZUS and givern to China by our zionist masters!
The “mainstream media†was never honest. There has always been an “agendaâ€, whether promoted by governments, or those above the government power structure who really “call the shotsâ€.
The “snag†in their plans is the internet, which makes it possible for anyone to put out their point-of-view, concerns, or theories, without having to negotiate with or gain approval from the (former) “gatekeepersâ€.
The powers-that-be and their media types are running scared and attempting to “put the genie back into the bottle†by forming “truth commissionsâ€, enlisting the major social media outlets to combat and marginalize “ideas†that do not conform to the “commonly accepted narrative†(what the media outlets and the powers-that-be WANT us to believe).
It is only a matter of time before media outlets use the flawed legal concept of “judicial notice†to disarm those who run counter to “commonly accepted beliefsâ€, not unlike what is used to silence and convict those who (attempt to) state the real truth of the so-called jewish “holocaustâ€. In holocaust case prosecutions, “judicial notice†is used to silence the truth, as real truth runs counter to “commonly accepted beliefsâ€, even if those “commonly accepted beliefs†can easily be disproven.
Attempts to silence those who will not “toe the party line†WILL fail, as most people now are smart enough to know that the “narrative†has always been rigged to favor the “powers-that-beâ€â€¦
The mainstream media has always been dishonest. From the “yellow journalism” of the late 1800s and early 1900s to today’s “fake news”, journalism has shown its true (communist) roots.
From the lies about the Spanish-American war to the New York Times’ walter duranty hiding the truth about and denying the Holodomor–the artificially engineered and forced communist “famine” in the Ukraine, to the lies about the 1968 Viet Nam communist Tet offensive (a military victory for the South Vietnamese and American troops) reported by walter cronkite as a military defeat, cronkite and his ilk were successful in prolonging the Viet Nam war for years, giving “aid and comfort” to the enemy, who bragged about being supported by the U S media.
Look at NBCs doctoring of GMC truck gas tanks, rigging them to explode, and the deliberate mischaracterization of George Zimmerman’s conversation withe the 911 dispatcher, deleting a key phrase, as well as showing Trayvon Martin as a 12-year-old cherub rather than his more recent “thug” facebook picture.
The media has become a “fifth column” of the government and is not to be trusted. The CIA has had its hooks in the media since the 1950s. In fact, Hollywood script writers were paid to insert anti-drug messages in their scripts during the “drug hysteria” period of the 1980s through 2000s.
Today, we have “crisis actors” embedded in our government and media, the same “crisis actors” who keep showing up, being used in every (fake) “crisis”. The mainstream media keeps parroting these impostors, thinking that we are stupid, not being able to see through their lies and deceptions.
To our advantage, we now have the internet, which gives the ordinary citizen the ability to see through the deceptions and lies, and the capability to be real “journalists”, quite often getting and reporting the story TRUTHFULLY before the mainstream media.
In fact, there are calls by “mainstream media” to “license” journalists, in an attempt to keep these “citizen journalists” out…twenty years ago, any journalist suggesting such a scheme would have been thrown out, but nowadays…who knows?
What’s with all the non-English speaking AM radio stations in Chicago? It’s like traveling down Cermak Road and seeing large numbers of Spanish signs. Why don’t they learn ENGLISH and speak it at business and home? Is that too much to ask in return for the LINK cards, bi-lingual government forms, emergency room health care, taxpayer funded schools and EITC for the invader kids?
yes, Webster.. you have hit on the substance but I believe your presentation has obscured the problem?
8 billion humans in the world, practice democracy, except for the interference of the 208 armed, rule-making, greed-led human-containers, called nation states. The nation states use weapons, sanctions, wars, armies, law, execution and propaganda to separate the mass of humans and to herd them into human containers (nation states) where the greedy in charge of the nation state, can grind the mind, much like a rock is ground in a crucible, into a putty suitable for remodeling and reshaping ( a technique known as divide and conquer). It is in the container-enclosed crucibles that the nation states use propaganda, police force, religion, social systems, education, language, history and reward systems to enforce the rules the nation states have instructed the jailers to maintain. Each human container is different but the techniques are the same. It is there inside the container, that the humans in one container are taught to hate the humans in one or many of the other containers (this pit one against the other is a technique known as polarization).
Just think we have three balls, each of them is put into a different container, each ball is painted a different color (say container 1=Red Ball, container 2=White Ball and container 3=Blue Ball). The red ball in container is taught not to trust the white ball in container 2, and to hate the blue ball in container 3. The blue ball in container 3 is taught to hate the red ball in container 1 and not to trust the white ball in container 2, the white ball in container 2 is taught to hate both the red ball in container 1 and the blue ball in container 3. How is this differentiation done.. ? That what we are talking about..
Nothing will change until humanity demands that those who govern work for humanity. Humanity must be and remain the Top Level Domain, and humanity must learn to protect itself from the greed led nation states.
Humanity must always subordinate greed lead nation state containers to the Top Layer of the power and authority hierarchy (the human domain). Adopting the policy that nothing can be done in any container unless it is fully respectful of human rights and then only if that respectful activity advances, without harm, the cause of all of humanity. Human rights are first.. not nation state rights.
A recent poll indicated a majority of Americans, including 46% (IIRC) of boomers, favor re-writing of the 1st Amendment to allow exceptions for “hate speech”. And the pendulum is still headed outboard. Shorter answer, “No.”
Cognitive dissonance has been defined as the adjustment of one’s perception of reality when the conflict between what one sees with their own eyes and what they feel must be true grows too large. With regards to the above poll, I will embrace CD – I choose not to live in a world where a majority of my follows could be so mind numbingly ignorant.
Even if there were such a critical mess, the system is solidly locked down against their mischief. Rather like how the political parties handle newcomers – anyone not pledging fealty to party not only gets no support but finds a well financed primary opponent in their way.
Cheers, we are doomed.
yes, Webster.. you have hit on the substance but I believe your presentation has obscured the problem?
8 billion humans in the world, practice democracy, except for the interference of the 208 armed, rule-making, greed-led human-containers, called nation states. The nation states use weapons, sanctions, wars, armies, law, execution and propaganda to separate the mass of humans and to herd them into human containers (nation states) where the greedy in charge of the nation state, can grind the mind, much like a rock is ground in a crucible, into a putty suitable for remodeling and reshaping ( a technique known as divide and conquer). It is in the container-enclosed crucibles that the nation states use propaganda, police force, religion, social systems, education, language, history and reward systems to enforce the rules the nation states have instructed the jailers to maintain. Each human container is different but the techniques are the same. It is there inside the container, that the humans in one container are taught to hate the humans in one or many of the other containers (this pit one against the other is a technique known as polarization).
Just think we have three balls, each of them is put into a different container, each ball is painted a different color (say container 1=Red Ball, container 2=White Ball and container 3=Blue Ball). The red ball in container is taught not to trust the white ball in container 2, and to hate the blue ball in container 3. The blue ball in container 3 is taught to hate the red ball in container 1 and not to trust the white ball in container 2, the white ball in container 2 is taught to hate both the red ball in container 1 and the blue ball in container 3. How is this differentiation done.. ? That what we are talking about..
Nothing will change until humanity demands that those who govern work for humanity. Humanity must be and remain the Top Level Domain, and humanity must learn to protect itself from the greed led nation states.
Humanity must always subordinate greed lead nation state containers to the Top Layer of the power and authority hierarchy (the human domain). Adopting the policy that nothing can be done in any container unless it is fully respectful of human rights and then only if that respectful activity advances, without harm, the cause of all of humanity. Human rights are first.. not nation state rights.
Asia would’ve been much better off had Chinese territory been partitioned between the Russians and the Japanese just as was supposed to happen before 1945. Chinese don’t deserve their own state, bunch of cowardly greedy inferior insectoids they are.
I believe that the Chinese people deserve a government that is fair and just, but they do not have one and neither do we goyim have one, we are slaves on a zionist plantation!
Thank you, Mr. Penfield for this detailed information on the history of the controlled U.S media. It reminds us of future media access reforms that will be needed as Jewish media domination in the U.S. becomes a thing of the past.
A speculated additional motivation for greater media control besides promoting warmongering and FDR’s other policies:
In the 1920s, millions of Americans understood that the Bolshevik revolution was basically a Jewish operation, including major funding supplied by American banker Jacob Schiff; that Russian communism was essentially a Jewish creation.
Greater media control would help conceal the source of communism.
I agree. But the Chinese people twice in the 20th century chose to side with the Devil, so in a sense they deserve to live under their current slave regime. I ain’t gonna lie brother, I don’t mind a nuclear war. The world as it is now is not worth preserving. If it takes a nuclear war to bring some cleansing, so be it.
A minor point was that the original AM stations could not compete with static-free FM when it was developed at 50 mc. (@ 50 mc FM has considerable range and tends to approximate the “service area” of many AM stations.) The AM stations’ owners and investors lobbied to move FM to 100 mc, where it had minimal broadcast range and was thus not economic.
This left US “listeners” listening to crappy low audio quality AM signals and the investors/owners cleaning up, while the investments in 50 mc FM became nearly worthless.
Eventually 100mc FM found audiences, but the process was delayed by 20 or 30 years…
Later on, 50 mc FM was used for the audio in analogue TV.
It’s all about power and money fellas…
In my opinion the Chinese people have no more control over who rules them then we do and in both cases in my opinion it is the zionists who control the central banks of the world and in our case the zionist privately owned FED, we are in the same boat.
There’s an interesting Soviet documentary about Zionism dated around 1973, I forgot what its called. No wonder they worked hard on collapsing the USSR. They were the last independent and proud power of the 20th century.
Re: comment #5 (animalogic) – I think I may have tarnished someone’s idol (FDR) a bit. Throwing out baseless charges of “unhinged hatred†(with no such examples) is a dead giveaway.
I made a point to go soft on FDR and include his Republican predecessor (Hoover) to share the economic and censorship blame. The widespread failure of the New Deal is not “assumed†but well documented in the Politically Incorrect Guide and article by Robert Higgs, both cited in my essay. I know a lot of people think Roosevelt “saved†the nation, but that doesn’t square with reality.
FDR’s spastic overreactions (killing the gold standard, forcing farmers to throw away good food, the overt NRA fascism, encouraging union violence, etc.) are not “20/20 hindsight†at all. These were the acts of an incompetent politician who obsessed over his own public image (thus the heavy use of censorship against all critics). If you just look to the prior decade, President Harding kept a cool hand and let the markets adjust & correct after the deep depression of 1920-21. Among others, ZeroHedge wrote about that here:
https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2017-12-19/how-government-inaction-ended-depression-1921
Excerpt: “price deflation was more severe… than during any point in the Great Depression; from mid-1920 to mid-1921, the Consumer Price Index fell by 15.8 percent.â€
Today, the thought of 1 percent deflation would create howls of panic from Wall Street. By 1923, despite dramatic cutbacks in federal spending after World War I (falling from $18.5 billion in 1919 to $3.3 billion in 1922) and despite crashing farm commodity prices, the economy was at 2.4% unemployment, down from nearly 12% unemployment just two years prior. By choosing restraint, permitting successful companies to clean up the mess from poorly run businesses, and allowing wages and prices to normalize, Harding displayed an understanding of the marketplace and a respect for Constitutional limits on his power. Hoover and Roosevelt failed badly in both areas.
Regarding comment #12 (RoatanBill): “Licensing is a ‘title of nobility’ that the founders deemed inappropriate. Licensing is graft and corruption written into law.”
I couldn’t agree more. You’re only the 2nd person I’ve seen make that connection. It’s a big deal that deserves more attention.
After your last column on student loan debt* and this one, I have become a fan, Mr. Penfield. To think, GASP!, that anyone mentions Reason** magazine and true Libertarianism on the unz site. Well, he’s got Ron Paul, who doesn’t get enough comments, usually, and P.C. Roberts who doesn’t want comments …. I hope I can read articles from you regularly on unz.
Just to add to all your sources/recommendations for further reading, I would like to add The Forgotten Man: A New History of the Great Depression by Amity Shlaes. It’s good reading and jives pretty well with what you wrote about Herbert Hoover. In addition, Peak Stupidity discusses a good video of a Mrs. Shlaes lecture about the great “Silent Cal” Coolidge, probably the best US President since the early 1800s.
I have some familiarity with radio broadcasting. In the 1970s at least, there were many many rules in place from the FCC, an agency to be FEARED. This is what happens when governments get big – people (in this case an entire industry that is supposed to be a feature of freedom) fear the government rather than vice versa. Oh, this country music station I know of had to hire a black guy for “diversity”, while no soul or R&B station was gonna even think about hiring any white people. The black guy didn’t last but a few months though … he didn’t like EITHER kind of music, Country OR Western.
.
* I didn’t agree with your proposed solution in your conclusion, but it was a very well-written comprehensive article on the entire mess that is the moral-hazard-inducing government-backed student loan scam.
** Traitors in the realm of the immigration invasion, but still correct on lots else. (I can’t vouch for the last decade, as I quit reading the magazine and site when they went Open Borders Full Retard.)
OK, FINE! For those Millennials who don’t know WTF I’m talking about, and don’t know what 50 Megacycles (I personally like MHz) means, here’s the reference about both kinds of music:
Video Link
Absolutely agree.
The zionist-khazars are in it up to their necks too. Wherever there is the opportunity for profit and power they will be show up.
Fecesbook, Google and all the other TechSkum are in China perfecting “smart cities” (read: opressive thought control totalitarian environments). The Chinese are a natural ally to all things EVIL. Chinese history is 5, ooo years of disintegration and the struggle to re-unify the state. The current Chi-Com leadership will never give their people freedom. They want continous, uninterrupted stability. For that to happen, freedom will be sacrificied.
China is headed for serious instability. They are in the process of losing their main protein source to African Swine Flu. It is going to get ugly and not just in China.
This is worldwide.
You can only substitute for other meat so much. It will take half a decade or more to rebuild the population of hogs and this flu has not even ran it’s course.
Governments should be implementing a world wide quarantine.
Will they?
Perhaps this is all part of the Georgia guidestones ‘elite’ scum plan to DEPOPULATE.
OT canard – how many more times?
Once and for all – LB “Gulf of Tonkin Resolution” Johnson was fully aware of exactly what was happening through multiple reports from the U.S. Navy, CIA, NSA and diplomatic sources in near real time. The incident could only be blamed on Egypt if LBJ and his war hawks played along. They did not.
Israel has long accepted the fact that it carried out the attack. It is the U.S. role in the affair that remains entirely murky. Perhaps, like the Bay of Pigs debacle, the Liberty incident is best understood as the result of factional infighting within the administration.
Master’s Thesis have been awarded for much less comprehensive works.
great analysis!
Indeed – many of FDR’s policies and techniques were consciously copied from Mussolini’s fascism in the 1920s, Germany’s Fascism 2.0, and of course inspired by the original totalitarianism pioneered by Lenin’s Communists in Russia.
Conversely, a detailed study would probably find that European fascists themselves took note of and copied talking points and techniques from the FDR gang. Post-democratic regimes in Europe and the U.S. were naturally keen to learn each others’ tricks.
Roosevelt’s military occupation of the Disney studios one day after Pearl Harbor certainly reflects advance planning, and is yet another indication that Roosevelt had effectively engineered the Japanese attack and even made arrangements to stand down routine defenses so as to maximize local casualties for media effect while keeping the U.S. carrier force safely out at see.
Perhaps, Joe, the Mexicans are the only drivers who still use the AM radio in their vehicles, for lack of anything else. I may be a little behind the times, but I remember when Mexicans were the ones driving the old American-made beaters of the 1970’s. One of them likely got one of mine at a police auction in fact, long story …
From back BEFORE the emergency rooms were overwhelmed, the EBT abused, and the IRS Earned Income Credited to people who don’t belong here, using deductions for children that are south o-the-border or nonexistent with stolen SS numbers, by 10’s of MILLIONS, this is what I’m talking about, Joe.
Video Link
(BTW, if it makes
youme feel any better, my parents wouldn’t spring for ANY options on cars, including AM radio – we were very lucky that one came standard on the one….)I completely agree with your points about media dishonesty going way back. It is in fact impossible to build an empire without a vibrant propaganda arm. The reason for that is that you need the tacit approval of a silent majority which you have to constantly point in the right direction the more erratic your actions are.
This brings me to the part of your comment which I disagree with, which is your (in my opinion) unsubstantiated faith in the ordinary people’s “ability to see through the deceptions and lies.” The “ordinary citizen” is easily bamboozled and coaxed into the opinions he’s supposed to have. This is an existential threat to the empire and they’ll use their immense powers to maintain that. The ordinary citizen of the 1930s and 40s easily forgot the silenced writers of their times.
It’s almost ‘comforting’ to realize that today’s censors and de-platformers are following age old traditions of lackeys, snitches, and subversives who, like their brethren in totalitarian regimes, have outdone themselves in zealously promoting the propaganda ministries they so faithfully serve.
The only major difference today is the fact that, in contrast to FDR’s time, these scoundrels have moved their allegiance from the Executive to the institutions of Federal bureaucracy leviathan, using the powers of these organs for their own nefarious purposes. This is especially visible in the Kennedy, Nixon, and Trump administrations.
Found your article to be excellent in depth, substance, and tone; like the 1st installment of great book. The discussion you are conducting is extremely pertinent today, showing that the current wave of censorship follows a long tradition which will not be easily stopped.
One point of contention I do have with this piece is your reference to the “conservative-libertarian wing of neo-con journals.” Libertarian and neo-con are mutually exclusive terms. Especially for someone who’s obviously read a considerable amount of Libertarian literature, as quoted in your piece, I find it impossible to understand how someone can inadvertently misconstrue these terms as to equate them.
You’d have to artificially graft neocon “libertarians” such as Ben Shapiro or Mark Levin onto the body of Libertarians in order to come up with that connection, while at the same time ignoring Ron Paul and the entire Mises Institute from the Libertarian definition. Whatever you have after removing those prominent entities from Libertarianism, ain’t Libertarianism.
I agree with you that there are many citizens whose only cares are the “cold beer in the refrigerator” and the “big sports game”, but there are many more who ARE aware.
Maybe I am being too optimistic, BUT, the internet DOES open up avenues that were previously unavailable to us mere “mortals”.
One can hope…
Regards,
Really? It appears FDR was Jewish (Dutch Jew). Here is his supposed list of Jews in his administration:
1. Bernard M. Baruch — a financier and adviser to FDR.
2. Felix Frankfurter — Supreme Court Justice; a key player in FDR’s New Deal system.
3. David E. Lilienthal — director of Tennessee Valley Authority, adviser. The TVA changed the relationship of government-to-business in America.
4. David Niles — presidential aide.
5. Louis Brandeis — U.S. Supreme Court Justice; confidante of FDR; “Father†of New Deal.
6. Samuel I. Rosenman — official speechwriter for FDR.
7. Henry Morgenthau Jr. — Secretary of the Treasury, “unofficial†presidential adviser. Father of the Morgenthau Plan to re-structure Germany/Europe after WWII.
8. Benjamin V. Cohen — State Department official, adviser to FDR.
9. Rabbi Stephen Wise — close pal of FDR, spokesman for the American Zionist movement, head of The American Jewish Congress.
10. Frances Perkins — Secretary of Labor; allegedly Jewish/adopted at birth; unconfirmed.
11. Sidney Hillman — presidential adviser.
12. Anna Rosenberg — longtime labor adviser to FDR, and manpower adviser with the Manpower Consulting Committee of the Army and Navy Munitions Board and the War Manpower Commission.
13. Herbert H. Lehman — Governor of New York, 1933-1942, Director of U.S. Office of Foreign Relief and Rehabilitation Operations, Department of State, 1942-1943; Director-General of UNRRA, 1944 – 1946, pal of FDR.
14. Herbert Feis — U.S. State Department official, economist, and an adviser on international economic affairs.
15. R. S. Hecht — financial adviser to FDR.
16. Nathan Margold — Department of the Interior Solicitor, legal adviser.
17. Jesse I. Straus — adviser to FDR.
18. H. J. Laski — “unofficial foreign adviser†to FDR.
19. E. W. Goldenweiser — Federal Reserve Director.
20. Charles E. Wyzanski — U.S. Labor department legal adviser.
21. Samuel Untermyer — lawyer, “unofficial public ownership adviser†to FDR.
22. Jacob Viner — Tax expert at the U.S. Treasury Department, assistant to the Treasury Secretary.
23. Edward Filene — businessman, philanthropist, unofficial presidential adviser.
24. David Dubinsky — Labor leader, president of International Ladies Garment Workers Union.
25. William C. Bullitt — part-Jewish, ambassador to USSR [is claimed to be Jonathan Horwitz’s grandson; unconfirmed].
26. Mordecai Ezekiel — Agriculture Department economist.
27. Abe Fortas — Assistant director of Securities and Exchange Commission, Department of the Interior Undersecretary.
28. Isador Lubin — Commissioner of Labor Statistics, unofficial labor economist to FDR.
29. Harry Dexter White [Weiss] — Assistant Secretary of the Treasury; a key founder of the International Monetary Fund, and the World Bank; adviser, close pal of Henry Morgenthau. Co-wrote the Morgenthau Plan.
30. Alexander Holtzoff — Special assistant, U.S. Attorney General’s Office until 1945; [presumed to be Jewish; unconfirmed].
31. David Weintraub — official in the Office of Foreign Relief and Rehabilitation Operations; helped create the United Nations; Secretary, Committee on Supplies, 1944-1946.
32. Nathan Gregory Silvermaster — Agriculture Department official and head of the Near East Division of the Board of Economic Warfare; helped create the United Nations.
33. Harold Glasser — Treasury Department director of the division of monetary research. Treasury spokesman on the affairs of United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration.
34. Irving Kaplan — U.S. Treasury Department official, pal of David Weintraub.
35. Solomon Adler — Treasury Department representative in China during World War II.
36. Benjamin Cardozo — U.S. Supreme Court Justice.
37. Leo Wolman — chairman of the National Recovery Administration’s Labor advisery Board; labor economist.
38. Rose Schneiderman — labor organizer; on the advisery board of the National Recovery Administration.
39. Jerome Frank — general counsel to the Agricultural Adjustment Administration, Justice, U.S. Court of Appeals, 1941-57.
40. Gerard Swope — key player in the creation of the N.R.A. [National Recovery Administration]
41. Herbert Bayard Swope — brother of Gerard
42. Lucien Koch — consumer division, N.R.A. [apparently-Jewish]
43. J. David Stern — Federal Reserve Board, appointed by FDR
44. Nathan Straus — housing adviser
45. Charles Michaelson — Democratic [DNC] publicity man
46. Lawrence Steinhardt — ambassador to Soviet Union
47. Harry Guggenheim — heir to Guggenheim fortune, adviser on aviation
48. Arthur Garfield Hays — adviser on civil liberties
49. David Lasser — head of Worker’s Alliance, labor activist
50. Max Zaritsky — labor adviser
51. James Warburg — millionaire, early backer of New Deal before backing out
52. Louis Kirstein — associate of E. Filene
53. Charles Wyzanski, Jr. — counsel, Dept. of Labor
54. Charles Taussig — early New Deal adviser
55. Jacob Baker — assistant to W.P.A. head Harry Hopkins; assistant head of W.P.A. [Works Progress Admin.]
56. Louis H. Bean — Dept. of Agriculture official
57. Abraham Fox — research director, Tariff Commission
58. Benedict Wolf — National Labor Relations Board [NLRB]
59. William Leiserson — NLRB
60. David J. Saposs — NLRB
61. A. H. Meyers — NLRB [New England division]
62. L. H. Seltzer — head economist at the Treasury Dept.
63. Edward Berman — Dept. of Labor official
64. Jacob Perlman — Dept. of Labor official
65. Morris L. Jacobson — chief statistician of the Government Research Project
66. Jack Levin — assistant general manager, Rural Electrification Authority
67. Harold Loeb — economic consultant, N.R.P.
68. William Seagle — council, Petroleum Labor Policy Board
69. Herman A. Gray — policy committee, National Housing Conference
70. Alexander Sachs — rep. of Lehman Bros., early New Deal consultant
71. Paul Mazur — rep. of Lehman Bros., early consultant for New Deal
72. Henry Alsberg — head of the Writer’s Project under the W.P.A.
73. Lincoln Rothschild — New Deal art administrator
Mencken was probably threatened by the Jewish Owned Media how else could they have stopped him. Of course, anyone who disagreed with the War Jews including Lindbergh was a Nazi. Is it any different from today? Jews use the same “Game Plan” over and over and no one challenges or stops them.
A pre-crime program is ridiculous when Barr has failed to put a single one of the massive number of corrupt Obama-era Democrats in jail yet. Barr, to put it bluntly, is too cowardly to go after them. He’s too cowardly to go after the Deep Democratic State elements who are trying to overthrow an elected government. Instead, he’s trying to distract Trump with fussing over this stupid will ‘o the wisp.
In 2020, Barr needs to be kicked out and replaced by a genuine pit bull of a prosecutor. We’ve had two losers so far, namely Sessions and Barr. Both are lawyers, but the important thing is, neither of them were ever prosecutors. They lack the temperament. They do not have the real fire in their stomach to see justice done. They want to be popular and get along with people more than they want to see evil rooted out and destroyed. When you battle evil, you have to be willing to make enemies. They’re not willing to do that because they lack moral courage.
Trump, a businessman, keep hiring guys who are ‘good businessmen.’ Everyone can get along with them. He needs a pit bull at Justice who isn’t there to coddle anyone’s feelings.
Imperial Japan committed provable atrocities in WW2. Japan INVADED China and hod pre-installed spies in the form of families in north China since the early 1900s. fact. They had deliberate intentions of taking over China as their little island wasnt big enough, China was weakened substantially by the opium wars and ineptitude of the failing late Ching dynasty. Therefore Japan wanted its resources.
Remember Japan was very brutal in WW2. Japan should not be whitewashed for its crimes, well documented. The survivors of the massacres are well documented.
Hers an example. I had 2 uncles in WW2, one in a German POW camp, one in a Japanese camp, The one that didnt survive was in the Japanese camp. My father who dropped bombs on Japanese submarines in the Pacific told me “you do NOT get caught by the Japanese” The Japanese atrocities of WW2 were much worse that the Weirmacht of even some of those of the Waffen SS! When I was a kid I was told PERSONALLY by someone in Singapore that witnessed Japanese atrocities in Singapore, I wont mention what, there were plenty of witnesses. These atrocities are NOT made up! Japan is very insular, and does not have any regard for life.
It is a habit of some alt media commentators and others ignoring Japanese crimes just because US dropped an atom bomb on them. Many in China say “good job”.
The history examined in this essay starts a generation late. The first upsurge of a genuinely populist progressive mass media press in America occurred between 1890-1916 as a result of new printing processes which allowed cheap publication of illustrated magazines. This development fostered the emergence of the “muck-raker” press (a smear term coined by Teddy Roosevelt, who also coined the smear “lunatic fringe”). As a result of the “muck-raker” press the most populist progressive Congresses America has yet seen passed pure food & drug and child labor laws and other beneficial legislation. It also prompted the power of consolidated wealth headquartered on Wall Street to find methods of stopping it. The two most effective were, firstly, to buy out the ownership of a magazine and appoint new editors. This is what happened, later, in the 30s, to Mencken’s American Mercury magazine and to many other magazines that supported non-intervention and, once bought out, changed their tune completely in a a matter of a month. Between 1908 and 1916 this method killed off many muckraker magazines. The other method, which has had more long-term poisionous effects, was to develop mass advertising as the primary support of magazines, so that a magazine full of ads could afford to make its cover price much lower than its cost of publication. This forced other magazines to follow suit in order to remain competitive and then, once the advertising syndicates held this whip over publishers, they began to dictate what could and couldn’t be published.
Good sources on this history are: five articles by Lincoln Steffens in Everybody’s Magazine (Sept 1910-Feb 1911), “It: An Exposition of the Sovereign Political Power of Organized Business,” Upton Sinclair, The Brass Check (Pasadena, 1920). Charles Edward Russell, three articles in Pearson’s (Jan, Feb & May 1914), “Keeping the Kept Press,” “The Magazines Soft-Pedal,” and “How Business Controls The News.” Samuel S. McClure, My Autobiography(1914), Frederic C. Howe, Confessions of a Reformer (1925), John Chamberlain, Farewell To Reform, C.C. Regier, The Era of the Muckrakers (1932), and the appendix to Robert La Follette’s Autobiography (1913).
More than government interference, the American mainstream press has been gagged by business consolidation. Most newspapers in America, large and small, are owned by chains. If you look into who owns your neighborhood throwaway you find out its the property of a company based in New York or Chicago that owns HUNDREDS of such “news” papers. Etc. Hearst was a pioneer in this. The dominant force controlling American media, like the dominant force controlling all aspects of the American economy, is big corporate business, big finance, and consolidated wealth, all headquartered in Manhattan. The entire absence of discussion of this factor in this essay is one reason to pay it little attention, which it contains little to reward.
Agree, see the book The Rape of Nanking by Iris Chang, can be had on amazon, also google Japans Unit 731 , their biological germ warfare unit, under which they subjected allied prisoners to horrendous experiments!
said:
“The Japanese atrocities of WW2 were much worse that the Weirmacht of even some of those of the Waffen SS!”
– And what alleged “atrocities” by the Wehrmacht & SS are you referring to?
– Remember, where you are. At this site such statements are likely to be challenged, and I’m challenging you.
Isn’t free speech grand?
You can find the transcript on the web, and you can hear part of the speech, but … as best as I can determine, you can’t hear the discussion of the Jews …. what you can hear .. along with the audience response … is here ..
Video Link
”In 1983, 50 corporations controlled most of the American media, including magazines, books, music, news feeds, newspapers, movies, radio and television.
By 1992 that number had dropped by half.
By 2000, six corporations had ownership of most media, and today five dominate the industry: Time Warner, Disney, Murdoch’s News Corporation, Bertelsmann of Germany and Viacom. With markets branching rapidly into international territories, these few companies are increasingly responsible for deciding what information is shared around the world. ”
But is it true that a certain ethnic group very disproportionately owned journalistic media
by the 1930’s?
Then why does the Jewish press run non-stop anti-China propaganda pieces? Why did they start a color revolution in Hong Kong?
1 + 1 = 2
It’s not hard to figure out.
Probably because the MIC always needs a bogeyman. A close look at China’s history proves my points correct. Don’t confuse China with Russia.
Fr. Charles Coughlin, Huey Long, Charles Lindbergh, and Ezra Pound were real American Men, willing to speak Truth to Power.
We need a million such now, like never before.
Mr. Powell: Good info on early American political attacks on free speech, including Teddy Roosevelt’s smear of “muck-rakers.†I’m only vaguely aware of that history and didn’t have time or energy to go beyond the 10,100 words of my main focus here.
I would be interested in seeing a summary of the “Good sources on this history†that you mentioned. I would especially be interested to hear more about your reference to the development of “mass advertising.†I too have noticed the “long-term poisonous effects†of that trend, mainly in our current media.
Namely, all “advertising†is really one-sided propaganda, often to the point of sentimental manipulation (catchy upbeat jingles, celebrity endorsements, etc.). Furthermore, all paid ads are nothing more than a bribe. If I really believe in a product (like my local car repair shop) I can tell people about that FREELY; if the product is so lame I need to be PAID to say something nice about it… that’s a bribe. Bribes tend to be morally corrupting (see any politician, Hollywood and Fake News) and cause mental blindness (see same groups for their support of most/all forms of evil). Also, any news source that insults its viewers with paid ads is blatantly engaging in “bait-and-switch†fraud; we’ve become so accustomed to that scam that it’s now accepted as legitimate, but it’s not. Widespread lying and bribery seem to have a dulling effect on our collective senses.
BTW, I’m all for free markets (I’ve worked for 25 years in the private-sector). I’m just not a fan of the gossip/slander/advertising/bribery cabal of federal broadcasters with exclusive FCC privileges, or the monopoly newspapers and their subsidized magazines. Those are hardly an open marketplace… in case any hardcore “liberty” people are reading this.
The federal legislation in 1927 and 1934 that gave us severe FCC restrictions is also a huge factor in media conformity and consolidation. So I focused on that. But I agree, there is much more to the story of press manipulation than Hoover’s and FDR’s brutal actions.
“successfully nationalized the airwaves with restrictive licensing”
If you look up the definition of “airwaves” you will find “not used in scientific discourse”, or similar. the government could not deny that radio waves didn’t exist until Mr. Marcon’s machine produced them. So, they determined that “radio waves” travelled on “air waves” which were public property. this enabled them to license them. I was surprised by this article, hearing the word “air waves” almost insures that the speaker is a government employee.
John Swinton who died in 1901 and was himself a famous journalist is quoted:
“There is no such a thing in America as an independent press, unless it is out in country towns. You are all slaves. You know it, and I know it. There is not one of you who dares to express an honest opinion. If you expressed it, you would know beforehand that it would never appear in print. I am paid $150 for keeping honest opinions out of the paper I am connected with. Others of you are paid similar salaries for doing similar things. If I should allow honest opinions to be printed in one issue of my paper, I would be like Othello before twenty-four hours: my occupation would be gone. The man who would be so foolish as to write honest opinions would be out on the street hunting for another job. The business of a New York journalist is to distort the truth, to lie outright, to pervert, to villify, to fawn at the feet of Mammon, and to sell his country and his race for his daily bread, or for what is about the same — his salary. You know this, and I know it; and what foolery to be toasting an “Independent Press”! We are the tools and vassals of rich men behind the scenes. We are jumping-jacks. They pull the string and we dance. Our time, our talents, our lives, our possibilities, are all the property of other men. We are intellectual prostitutes. ”
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/John_Swinton
But for the clown who wrote this article all was well before Roosevelt.
What I find interesting in particular in this quote, which was apparently from a speech in 1883, is the admission that a journalist is a puppet for “rich men behind the scenes” and that he sells out his “race”. So I assume that the press was already in 1883 in firm control by jews who are also in economic control.
On the subject of economic control of the US by jews I generally recommend the lecture of the following book:
https://archive.org/details/TheGreatRedDragonOrLondonMoneyPower/page/n2
But yeah, you all assume that the US were in firm control by WASPs at that time without any plausible explanation how the great power shift came about.
Chris – Thanks for the note… at least the first paragraph. I certainly know the difference between “neo-con†and “libertarian†(you cut off the full quote) but I didn’t find a need in my essay to quibble over the distinction. My point is that both conservatives and libertarians are COMPLETELY FINE with FCC broadcasting controls to keep out all independent voices. If I’m incorrect, please tell me ONE of your libertarian heroes who has said ANYTHING useful about those landmark 1927 and 1934 laws (or FCC licensing in general) in the last 10 or 20 years. Certainly not Ron Paul, who I generally like.
On the broader subject you (perhaps inadvertently) raised… unfortunately, too many Liberty Leaguers are busy manufacturing endless books and articles blaming the Fed or the IRS or the Deep State for every ill that faces our society. Personal responsibility seems to only be an occasional talking point for too many people. Libertarians who endlessly whine about corrupt “government schools” but then send their own kids to those same schools are a particular favorite of mine.
Other than that, the Liberty crowd wastes time complaining about life-saving, easy-to-enforce seat belt laws on public roads (but they’re OK with mandatory seat belt rules at private amusement parks) and the divine “right†to breed chickens and park a boat in their front yard (Liberty zealots claim to love property rights, but hate HOA’s that actively protect property value). They generally love to bicker over pointless nonsense to distract from their own multi-generational impotence on everything they hold dear. To me, that’s a sign of intellectual laziness from do-nothing, passive-aggressive political malcontents. Like their left/right “adversaries,†Liberty professionals are usually people that don’t work for a living, but rely on tax-favored charitable gifts from their loyal supporters. That approach always leads to superficial extremism and substantial futility, from my experience. That mindset cannot fathom the art of creative problem solving–a huge need these days.
I appreciate the anti-war, anti-IRS, anti-Fed writings of some of the better libertarian thinkers found at Mises and LRC. But after a while, you actually have to stand FOR something TANGIBLE. Why not try something more productive once in a while?
If I understood well the article (maybe I didn’t), I see a fundamental problem with it, the fact that the article has two subjects at the same time. One subject is a very complicated one and Steve Penfield mentions several aspect of it: the New Deal, the welfare state, the wars, global warming and so on. The other subject is free speech, freedom of the press and so on. Penfield seems to think that the the left was responsible for the New Deal, for the welfare state, wars and that this left is also responsible for the end of the freedom of press and free speech.
His conclusion seems to be that if you are for free speech and for a free press you also have to be against the welfare state. It’s a wrong conclusion. All those identifications of the left with such actions are completely mistaken. The left also suffers from censure. After all who criticises this state of affairs more than the left? Has Penfield never read what Jonathan Cook wrote about this question, or the books by Chomsky (Media Control, Manufacturing Consent)?
If what Penfield says is right, than we would have been in a paradise under the Bushs and under Reagan. Who could be more conservative than Reagan? To think that our welfare state is the accomplishment of the dreams of the left is very naive. The “welfare state” is simply the minimal condition for the functioning of unbriddled capitalism. Even if you consider that mainstream Democrats are leftists, you have to concede that wars have been supported by both parties, Republicans and Democrats.
What went wrong with the thoughts of Penfield? He thinks that Hilary Clinton is the left, that Roosevelt is a leftist and he thinks that we could have a society that functions if we adopt his radical liberalist ideals. David Graeber has shown that Liberalism created burocracy and repression.
His history of the press is interesting but his thoughts about politics seem to be mistaken. His political thoughts seem to be too irrealistic.
If someone parks in front of your garage you may want to call the police and to know who is the owner of the car. You have to pay fees in order to have streets where you can drive your car. Or do you think everybody should pay equally for it, even the people who don’t have a car?
You’re G-D’d right.
If you answer all my other questions, I’ll answer yours.
Mr. Newman – good comments, as usual. Yes, I have Amity Shlaes’ book The Forgotten Man. I wasn’t all that impressed, though. I view her recent work as what I’ve come to recognize as the sport of Academic Rope-a-Dope: dazzling the audience with some obscure and irrelevant tidbit, prompting the reader to say “Wow, this gal really knows her stuff!†(Of course, this trick is very common amongst mainstream authors. Big league publishers seem to push that approach to advance their hidden agendas.)
Once she has lulled the audience to sleep via the Rope-a-Dope tactic… she drops the hammer. As for her “forgettable†book about the Great Depression, anyone who isn’t pro-war is an “isolationist.†Anyone who isn’t in league with FDR’s New Deal schemes is a right-wing “extremist,†etc. She also smears all independents like Huey Long, Coughlin, Hearst, etc. with nothing but crude insults (never supported with evidence). Ms. Shlaes reminds me of George Will. Both are smooth writers and intelligent people, totally in cahoots with the Deep State. But yes, there are a few interesting tidbits of history in her book.
BTW, I saw your comments on my Student Debt article as well, thanks (mostly). Feel free to drop me an email anytime… would like to hear your thoughts directly.
FDR’s legacy is blessed with the fact that there were several other larger-than-life tyrants oppressing the rest of the world at the same time. In that context he merely represented the illusion of defending freedom.
The bigger story missed here revolves around the many indicators that long before there was any fantasy that President Donald Trump might be a Russian stooge, FDR’s State Department, War Department, the White House, and vast swaths of the US government were riddled with useful idiots in service to Stalin and the COMINTERN, and there are number of published accounts that, when re-read in absence of the aura that surrounds the Hero of the New Deal suggest FDR himself the most willing and the biggest of them. The censorship and oppression of the media was merely a tool to those ends.
This is not necessarily borne out by your full paragraph
As I tried to clarify in my initial comment, Libertarians stand first and foremost for freedom from coercion (the non-aggression principle), as such, the issues of property, free speech, and war are non-negociable tenants of this philosophy.
As much as a Tucker Carlson is good on war issues, the fact that he endorses Elisabeth Warren’s ‘economic’ policies, makes it absurd to refer to him as a Libertarian, any more than calling PETA proponent Nazis because Hitler also supported animal rights (you might call them Nazis for their methods, but that’s another matter). And if this is true of Tucker, it is true in spades for all other FoxNews or Radio commentators you referred to, who consider themselves to be libertarians. It is akin to Lincoln’s question: “If we call the tail a leg, … how many legs does a dog have?†to paraphrase, ‘if a neocon calls himself libertarian, is he really libertarian?’
But to return to your critique:
Are you trolling me Steve ? This is anathema to anything libertarian by definition. If they were to accept such state control in this crucial field, on what basis could they stand up to any State interference in any other field ? That would be one whopper of an exception to their entire creed, which abhors all State interference.
It’s exactly in a series of Mises Institute lectures that I first heard of these regulations in the first place. Far from being some exception to the general Libertarian critique of State interference, it was another prime example of it.
your comment continues:
True, Madona didn’t write anything about FCC broadcasting controls either but then, neither her nor Ron Paul are economist or historians. One person who was, however, qualified and did write about that was Murray Rothbard: (Did you even bother searching for this or did you prefer to bluff ?)
https://mises.org/wire/freedom-television-and-radio
Nov 11, 2018 The WWI Conspiracy
What was World War One about? How did it start? Who won? And what did they win? Now, 100 years after those final shots rang out, these questions still puzzle historians and laymen alike. But as we shall see, this confusion is not a happenstance of history, but the wool that has been pulled over our eyes to stop us from seeing what WWI really was. This is the story of WWI that you didn’t read in the history books. This is The WWI Conspiracy.
Video Link
Bankers Hate Peace: All Wars Are Bankers’ Wars
In the beginning of World War I, Woodrow Wilson had adopted initially a policy of neutrality. But the Morgan Bank, which was the most powerful bank at the time, and which wound up funding over 75 percent of the financing for the allied forces during World War I … pushed Wilson out of neutrality sooner than he might have done, because of their desire to be involved on one side of the war.
https://www.globalresearch.ca/bankers-hate-peace-all-wars-are-bankers-wars/5438849
Wow. I will read this book. Unfortunately my knowledge of the history of the era, the 1800s, is too weak for me to intelligently critique it, but it will be grist for my mill
We know Penfield is reading the comments. I called him out with the Malynski quote, and you’ve called him out several times. The result: nada. The fact that he does not respond to these obvious indications that the US press was controlled before WW I indicates to me that he either doesn’t know enough about the era, or it too politically correct to discuss it. Which is it?
The first third of the Woolfolk book is essential, in it he describes the strategy of the jewish money power seated in London and how it had devoured all key industries in the US and how the so called “robber-barons” were only the agents of that money power, and he explains that they were not as rich as one would assume and had to give their money to foundations which were not under their control.
One has to understand that the complete control of the narrative is an absolute key for the jewish strategy of taking over a country by stealth. So if they target a country, the very first thing must be the complete control of all the mass media in that country with any means possible (not excluding sabotage, fire, murder etc.)
So when the jews have an economic control in a country, one can conclude that they must have already established the media monopoly before. During WW1 it becomes increasingly obvious that jews run the US economy. Bernard Baruch and his cronies are the economic dictators of the war effort. The delegation at the peace conference at Versailles where the US emerges as the foremost world power is almost exclusively comprised of jews. So one must conclude that the mass media must have been under control some time before.
The question is how far back reaches the jewish control of the US economy. Sombart argues in his book “The Jews and Modern Capitalism” that the jews were always in control of the Americas since Columbus. If that would be true, there would have been never a press not under their control. But his argument is a bit sketchy, so this should be field of study. But in any case Penfield’s assertion that before Roosevelt there was a free and pluralistic press cannot be true.
All the texts I cite except Chamberlain and Regier are first hand eyewitness accounts and immediately address the issues you raise. Steffans, Sinclair, and Russell are all extremely pertinent, and fundamental. Read them and see. Thorstein Veblen’s Theory of Business Enterprise includes important basic discussion of the effects of advertising on business and the price level but was written long before the major onslaught. This occurred in the 1920s and was partly predicated on what big business learned from the draft induction exams of World War One — that the average American male of 20 had a “mental age” of ten, which made him an easy mark for all manner of lying swindles. Couple that with “advances” in “mass psychology” and, voila, Madison Avenue!
Talking about “free markets” in America is just silly. There are NO FREE MARKETS in America, except, to some degree, for labor. Competition is a cultivated delusion. It’s a free country. You can pick the Donkey puppet or the Elephant puppet, Coke or Pepsi, Chevy or Ford, etc., but the price level is established by distributors in collusion with manufacturers and retailers and there is NOTHING free about it. Business figured this out in the 1880s and JP Morgan “organized” corporate industry to eliminate industrial competition therefore, in the 1890s. This is incontrovertible historical fact, and the fact that 90% of Americans think otherwise is just evidence of the success of corporate propaganda. The only quasi “free” competitive market in America is for labor — for the purpose of keeping it as cheap as possible, including by importing 10 million people to exploit as “illegal”. Get a clue.
Steve, you are probably unaware of, and certainly by all signs have not begun to grasp the import of the fact that ownership of the American economy is concentrated in the hands of one person in one thousand, who own at least 28% of everything, with their holdings concentrated in controlling interests in all major economic and social institutions– industrial, financial, commercial, communications, transportation, publishing, etc. This group — 160 thousand families among 320 million of us, with the core power in the hands of one in ten thousand, 16 thousand families, who own 14% of everything — controls the economic system, social institutions, and government, and has for a very long time. Most of its wealth is hereditary. These facts are incontrovertible but hard to find because kept concealed, for obvious reasons. Until you rethink your views in light of this fundamental determining fact, you are wandering blindfolded in a maze designed to keep you confused, lost, vulnerable.
“left” and “right,” “Donkey” and “Elephant” are just masks. There purpose is to confuse, and it works. Supposedly “left” FDR, scion of the oldest banking family in America, presided over a great consolidation of wealth, a world war leading to Wall Street (supposedly “America”) supplanting The City of London’s (supposedly “England’s”) world empire, and the foundation, in the aftermath, under Truman, presided over by a cabal of Wall Street lawyers — Forrestal, Patterson, the Dulleses, Atkinson, Donovan, etc. — of the so called “Security State”. President Eisenhower, supposedly “right,” warned us that only an alert informed CITIZENRY can restore democracy in America. Skip the political ideologies, which are all diversionary by nature: attend to facts. It will clear your thinking considerable.
I haven’t read Schlae’s book and it sounds like I don’t need to, since she’s obviously peddling, at third hand, the same old pack of official lies. If you want to delve into ANY historical subject, on an intelligent ADULT basis, the first thing to do is get acquainted with primary witnesses — that is, eye-witness accounts contemporary with the events. The three best such books on the American Depression of the 1930s that I have encoutered are Gilbert Seldes, The Years of the Locust: America 1929-1932 (Boston, Little Brown, 1933), Edmund Wilson, American Jitters (New York, Scribners, 1932) and Louis Adamic, My America 1928-1938 (New York, Harper, 1938).
Two more starkly revealing pieces are John J. Spivak, “Bitter Unrest Sweeps the Nation,” American Mercury (Mencken’s old magazine) August 1934 vo. 32 no. 128 p. 385-393, and Mary Shattuck Fisher, “The Emancipated Woman, p. 311-322 in Who Owns America, ed. Herbert Agar and Allen Tate (Boston, Houghton Mifflin, 1936). Fisher’s piece is devastating, scalding plain sense for all ages.
On the New Deal three major primary witnesses are Benjamin Stolberg & Warren Jay Vinton, The Economic Consequences of the New Deal (New York, Harcourt Brace, 1935), Charles A. Beard & George H.E. Smith, The Old Deal and the New (New York, Macmillan, 1940) and John Flynn, The Roosevelt Myth (New York, Devin-Adair, 1948). It is telling that all these books were published by major publishers except the last mentioned, which was published after the war, after the clampdown. This clampdown, notice, Mr. Penfield, was accomplished, by big business.
Further confirmation of the malicious actions of Roosevelt, recommended:
Roosevelt Conspired to Start World War II in Europe: https://www.unz.com/article/roosevelt-conspired-to-start-world-war-ii-in-europe/
New Documents Show: Roosevelt colluded with Stalin, September 20, 2012: https://forum.codoh.com/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=11013&p=83910&hilit=Roosevelt+colluded+with+Stalin#p83910
said
“FDR’s legacy is blessed with the fact that there were several other larger-than-life tyrants oppressing the rest of the world at the same time. ”
– Besides Stalin, who would those “other larger-than-life tyrants oppressing the rest of the world at the same time.” be?
About Lilian Gish for sure!
She came around and helped the FOOFs (“Friends Of Old Films”) during her retirement years and told them stories about D.W.Griffith. She never knocked the man, never crapped on his memory. To her, he was Mister Griffith, the man who mattered.
I’m sure she would have made more money if she’d have slagged him. She would not. She was loyal to him and now her name is being crapped on. Makes sensed: Loyalty is a virtue they are trying to destroy also!.
Mr. Penfield, firstly, I’m glad you read through the comments here, and thank you for the kind reply. I’ll give you the benefit of the doubt on The Forgotten Man. It’s been about a decade since I read it (looking it up just now, I see that that seems to be just a while after it was published). I read it AS a libertarian, so I must have not caught all of the author’s statism that you mention.
I don’t remember her discussion of FDR’s push for entry into World War II, but obviously this was near the end of the book. I may not have had quite the same opinion on that as I do now, so …
Mrs. Shlaes’ video about Calvin Coolidge was something I liked just 1 1/2 years ago, so I’m pretty sure my opinion on Peak Stupidity was the same as my opinion now. Hey, it ain’t many people who run Calvin Coolidge fan sites! ;-} There was inarguably no better Libertarian in the office of US President in the 20th/21st centuries.
Regarding your previous column, yeah I tried to write constructive criticism, but out of habit in trying to talk some semblance of sense into some of the Socialists and flat-out Commies who are not just commenters, but AUTHORS, on unz.com I’ve been in the habit of snark and destructive criticism. Mr. Unz is not kidding when he offers “controversial perspectives”, but I shit you not, Mr. Penfield, that there are authors and commenters arguing about whose 5-year plans were more kick-ass, those of the USSR or those of Mao’s China! Haha, it’s great to read another* non-retarded perspective, as I’ve seen in your 2 comprehensive columns so far**.
.
* I read Steve Sailer, John Derbyshire, Fred Reed (only in order to tear him a new one, uusally), the Audacious Epigone, and the syndicated guys like Buchanan and Dr. Paul.
** That’s why I’d thought that your previous column and maybe this one too were written for a wider audience than just this website. You obviously spent a lot of time on these.
Mr. Powell… oh boy, what a lot of words to say so little. Too bad, since I’m detecting a flicker of valid information beneath that large pile of fluff. Hard to take anyone seriously who blurts out:
“Until you rethink your views in light of this fundamental determining fact [sic], you are wandering blindfolded in a maze designed to keep you confused, lost, vulnerable.â€
“Skip the political ideologies, which are all diversionary by nature: attend to facts. It will clear your thinking considerable.†(directed at UncommonGround)
Wow. Hard to believe that some people find socialists (or whatever you call yourself) to be unbearably smug.
I thought my 10,000 word essay was LOADED with facts… and very few ideological labels, on purpose for the very reason you cite. I don’t see any “facts†at all in your voluminous comments… just repeating your rigid ideological conclusion: private corporations are the source of all evil.
If all those deep thinkers (but “not socialistsâ€!) you reference in Comment #65 and elsewhere have anything valid to say, why can’t you do the world a big favor and invest a few hours of your time in summarizing those Great Works of academic achievement in your own words?
It seems very lazy (and a bit cowardly) to lecture an audience of complete strangers to go and read: “Five articles by Lincoln Steffens… a book by angry socialist crusader Upton Sinclair, three articles by another guy I’ve never heard of (I must be uneducated), an entire autobiography by Sam McClure (I’ve heard of him), and three other books from 1913 to 1932†that would be nearly impossible to find.
Why should anyone else waste 100s of hours of their time digging out and reading those obscure books and articles if a self-appointed Subject Matter Expert cannot explain those ancient texts in plain English? Let me guess, the “sheep†are too stupid to understand your refined scholarly wisdom. No one needs the advice of an angry, unbalanced stranger barking out “Read them and see. … Get a clue.â€
Also, your entire premise of bashing/scapegoating private “corporations†seems to be a cop out for coming up with a valid argument for what does or doesn’t work on any given societal challenge. Your very long discourses are full of empty sloganeering… not any “facts†at all. I still can’t figure out: are you for or against federal control of the radio waves? Rather than fussing over the meaning of “control,” how about the question of giving FCC the power to grant or deny anyone access to broadcasting over arbitrary mandates to only serve the “public interest”? That was the main theme of my essay, which you conveniently ignore.
Your lengthy dissertations mixed with corporate scapegoating make for a cute trick some people use to emotionally manipulate people to blindly accept trillions more in taxes and millions of more “must†and “shall†rules to micro-manage our lives. (I work in private-sector environmental consulting; I see those rules all the time. There are about 20 billion-dollar companies, and hundreds of multi-million-dollar firms, PROFITING from that one sector of hyper-legalism in the U.S.) I see that you don’t like “labels” … so that’s the substance behind coercive social justice.
The very “fact†the Roosevelt had to go to great lengths to CENSOR the various independent writers, publishers and speakers of the 1930s significantly disproves your entire thesis that the evil “corporate†takeover of the Press from 1908 to 1916 permanently killed free speech. In particular, Big Gov’t types in the 1930s hated long-time Democrats Hearst, Coughlin, et al because they were too independent.
Maybe you should stop lecturing people and have the guts to advance your own opinions once in a while. Just a thought.
I gotta agree with Chris here, not on all the details of who in the Mises Institute wrote this or that, but just in that your commenter was giving some very polite feedback, while differing on one small point of your use of the terms “neo-con” and “libertarian”. Your last 2 paragraphs make a decent point, that I will address in a minute, but that’s not an argument to Chris’ point.
I’ll tell you now, that you will eventually get the Commie wacko sack-hangers of one Godfree Roberts on here, if you’re not extremely lucky, and then you’ll not in the least be worried about responding to small points of criticism such as this! Let’s keep the conversation at a constructive level if we can – I though Chris’ was, very much, and I’ll do my best on that.
As to what you say about the lack of ACTION, I cannot disagree. However, these “Liberty Professionals” are just pundits. That’s what they do, is pontificate on this, that, and the other thing. It takes the right kinds of people to actually form organizations for home-schoolers, make un-censored social media software/sites to fight the big guys, and yes, even fight city hall together on the right to raise chickens in one’s backyard or work on the damn car out in the driveway. Pundits of all these institutes and think tanks don’t do much resembling action. However, read some of the survivalist sites or gun sites, and you will read of people taking action, even if it’s just in form of resistance to the system.
You did get me right in the gut with your criticism of the home-school fans who don’t actually do it. As Peak Stupidity wrote, homeschooling is poking the beast in the eye with a big stick. ( See Part 2 and Part 3.) I’m a big supporter. However, right now we have a good school that I’ve paid property tax for YEARS for. The next step will require a move, paying out the ying-yang for private school (probably not), or homeschooling, but the wife is rigid-thinking on the latter. (yeah, I know … pussy-whipped… etc., we’ll see.) As it is, even in elementary school, I’ve got to teach against the BS slipped into classes, books, and the on-line stuff. (I just told my wife we were terminating something called “Razz-kids” – hell, the boy can read 3 grades above his level anyway – he just likes the software that is more video game than learning!)
And today we find the only possible mediums of audio and print left able to enlighten public at large minds, the Internet, is being censored by military/Internal Security/Corporate/ Educational-scientific- an ignorant and herd instinct public, government and financial oligarchs powers.
The amounts of known means to control minds of people today that are already in use, has millions of Americans being paid to find more and improved ways; ways that the led have no comprehension of how, why, and by whom they are being led.
There is no means left to reverse the gains of those who seek evermore control of minds, once our individual means to decide are lost the new technology will totally erase any and all remembrances of options.
Thanks Achmed ! I really appreciate that.
I really do like Steve’s article very much (other than the part where he builds a libertarian straw man) and find that his broaching of this topic could not be more timely.
Also, to your other point, with rare exceptions :-), I cannot understand why people who feign to aspire at a conversation, come down like the proverbial ton of bricks on their perceived opponents, thus rendering any conversation void. Frankly, I don’t have the time to engage in that kind of interaction. I’m in no way saying Steve did that of course, just that there is a bit of disingenuousness in his painting libertarians as akin to conservatives and neocons. This seems especially unnecessary because the point is so easily debunked!
“Healthy distain” should be “healthy disdain.” That would have been corrected merely by running spell-check, no?
Also, the phrase “similar anti-New Deal views as Lorimer’s” probably should be “anti-New Deal views similar to Lorimer’s.”
Substantively, a worthwhile column that I’ve just forwarded to some friends and family.
Appreciate and agree with many of your comments about mandatory government licensing.
But what about the double standard you espouse?
In your view, a person who has great wealth is not “extorting” anything from his employees when he takes advantage of the leverage and bargaining power that his great wealth confers upon him.
But people who lack such wealth and the power that comes with it, they are somehow “extorting” the public by banding together in an effort to muster economic power and thus bargaining leverage closer to their employer’s?
Sick, man. That kind of irrational (and heartless, in practice) one-sided garbage drives people to the left. Which is not where they should be., on balance, we’ll agree.
Hey Chris –
As per your pull quote, I had asked for “ONE of your libertarian heroes who has said ANYTHING useful about those landmark 1927 and 1934 laws (or FCC licensing in general) in the last 10 or 20 years.”
And you cited (after much verbiage) a generic quote from Murray Rothbard, who died in 1995 (i.e., 24 years ago). That seems to confirm that most “libertarians” are pretty much AWOL on FCC controls. That’s too bad, and pretty surprising to me given the liberty mindset.
Other than that, it seems to me that you’ve gone to great lengths to demonstrate why libertarians are morally superior to conservatives. Perhaps true in general, but I don’t really have a dog in that fight. I would refer to my prior statements (not “straw man” or “trolling” or anything close to it). I’m generally more impressed by what people accomplish.
I thought only SJWs had “identity” issues… :o)
The texts cited in #92 are essential evidence of the facts of these matters. That they represent judicious selection from a much wider range of research will be apparent to people acquainted with research in these fields. As evidence, they differ wildly from the likes of Schlae, or from vacuous argumentative rants.
It would be absurd to claim that FDR’s administration was not steeped in propaganda, in manipulation of public opinion, in ‘public relations’ and in persecution of its opponents. This history, too, is well established. But FDR and his administration were a transitory phenomenon. The suppression of pertinent history in America is an ongoing project, 74 years after FDR’s death, and its primary operatives are to be found in the world of business, finance, and their hirelings in the colleges and media.
An acquaintance with pertinent facts is key to understanding history and in no way to be replaced by second- or third-hand “summaries,” or opinionation, or ideological thimblerig, or name calling (“socialist”! oh dear me!). Consult them or don’t, accordingly as your purposes and capacities permit, or don’t.
I don’t see where your basic premise is valid. Lets take Jeff Bezos for example. He doesn’t employ anyone to the best of my knowledge, Amazon does. He’s an incredibly wealthy man that heads a large corporation. The corporation offers jobs and people can either accept a position or turn it down. That’s the free market in operation.
A union, on the other hand, is a parasitic organization that forces itself on to a corporation and the corporation has no option to refuse the extortion that follows because the law says so. It is the forced association by law that I object to. If people want to unionize and have the union represent them for wages and benefits, that’s fine. The corp should have the option to refuse to deal with the union and fire all the people that don’t want to take what is on offer. If the corp agrees to bargain with the union without being forced into that situation, then I have no issues with the union.
You should also realize that unionization only works if a small percentage of the population are union members. If everyone was in a union then the extortion each union represents gets averaged out and market rates again determine salary and benefits only now with the essentially useless union structure leaching off the membership. Anyone not in a union should be anti union as those people end up paying for the above average salary and benefits union workers get via the increased costs the public has to pay in the price for the product or service the corp sells.
Now, would you care to apologize for the sick comment?
Booooring. Honestly only read about 1/4 of it, went to comments, saw “onebornfree” loved the article, so I know its a crap article. What are you going on about? The press is owned by the rich, always has been, always will. Its is pro-capitalist, anti-socialist, pro war, pro empire, pro business.
Damn your right wingers should really get over your FDR nightmare. Just be honest about why you hate the long dead guy. He betrayed the rich a teeny tiny bit, and somewhat gave the poor a little teeny tiny bit more than what you greedy shekel worshiping fascists would have liked, he saved your precious capitalism from a real socialist movement when it really had a chance, you got your forever war with the Russians and Chinese with his death and screwing of Wallace.
You’ve won. Get the fuck over it. You own it all, we can’t even get fucking single payer healthcare in this “country” like the rest of the civilized world, even the so called 3rd world. What the hell are you all so upset about? You’ve rigged the electoral process pretty flawlessly in your favor, everything rigged in your favor.. Countless poor souls die fighting your wars, spend trillions fighting them, doesn’t cost you a dime, to please your obsession of conquering Russia and China and ruling the world and you all have the nerve to go on about a dude that died nearly a century ago. Boo fucking hoo! You poor fascists. Jeez Louise.
When the tide turns again, and it will, I suspect soon, don’ think people are going to forget all this. The writing is already on the wall. Mark it down.
SOVIET ZIONOLOGY SECRET AND EXPLICIT GOALS AND DEEDS OF THE ZIONISTS. 1973 BANNED KGB DOCUMENTARY
Video Link
” As a result of the “muck-raker†press the most populist progressive Congresses America has yet seen passed pure food & drug and child labor laws and other beneficial legislation.”
Ah…a communist. No wonder you dismiss this article so easily. It really stings you to see your idol, FDR exposed for what he was.
I do tend to check up on things where conspiracy is alleged so I Googled “USS Liberty 2017” and you seem to have a point. The nearest to a MSM mention that I got from that search was an article in Haaretz!
https://www.haaretz.com/us-news/but-sir-its-an-american-ship-never-mind-hit-her-1.5492908
said
“But people who lack such wealth and the power that comes with it, they are somehow “extorting†the public by banding together in an effort to muster economic power and thus bargaining leverage closer to their employer’s?”
You mean ‘unions’ which have monopolies on employment, ‘unions’ which ban workers who don’t want to pay the union elite mafia in order to make a living.
I present to you Exhibit A, Mr. Penfield.
I don’t have a dog in this fight either, I’m just pointing out your falsely misconstrued point.
Rothbard wrote very critically about FCC regulations and you know it. To pretend libertarians have no problem with it is disingenuous and a very easily debunked falsehood.
I remember “J. Alfred Powell” boosting Robert Stinnett’s “Day of Deceit” which negates any idea of FDR as his idol. The trouble is it supports the idea that he cites books whose footnotes and references he hasn’t checked meticulously.
;^)
Pretty sure that was John T Flynn based on your description
You missed this one:
It should read: …may have”voluntarily” gone into oblivion… but the question remains: Why did Mencken more or less drop out of sight in 1940?
I agree it was a worthwhile read, and wasn’t it devilishly clever of author Steve Penfield to conceal the scope of his article in its title?
… and, Exhibit B.
Ha, crap! I saw both of those errors and meant to correct the writer on your one (“have gone”) but not on RadicalCenter’s one (“disdain”) because I looked at it and thought “maybe I’ve been writing this wrong”. I wouldn’t write in corrections just to be picky, but more to enable this correction on the post, so readers that do know their spelling/grammar won’t be turned off a very good piece of writing by some little things.
I also didn’t expect that big story of William Hearst embedded within here. It could be a story all its own. What I think about the man from this account is that he seemed to mean well and be always amenable to changing his view if proven wrong. That’s a good thing.
However, it’s best when there are people in positions of power (as Hearst indeed was, “voluntary power” you might say, as people didn’t have to read his newspapers) who are smart enough to ALREADY KNOW ahead of time about the stupidity of trying to goose the economy with Big-Gov programs, and the other mistakes he changed his opinions on. Libertarians, other than the Reason magazine open-borders Libertards, DO KNOW from basic principles why things will go wrong ahead of time. Imagine if Barry Goldwater, one such Libertarian, had won the 1964 US Presidential election! The country would have remained great for quite a while longer.
that book is full of half truth and outrageous lies made by a jewish we wuzer boosting their self proclaimed chosenitism
i will cited only two concepts that science have no proven incorrect and reveal the character of the author ->here is proclaiming the purity of the jewish race and how in more than 2000 years they didnt mix at all
“A common answer as regards the Jews was that they continued to mix with their non-Jewish neighbours in the Diaspora as they had done before. Renan, Loeb, Neubauer and others believe that the modern Jews are in large measure the descendants of heathen proselytes in the Hellenistic Age, or of marriages between Jews and non-Jews in the early centuries of the Common Era. The existence of fair Jews (to the extent of 13 per cent), especially in Eastern Europe, lent probability to this opinion. But to-day, so far as I can make out, the entirely opposite view generally prevails — that from the days of Ezra to these the Jews have kept strictly apart. For more than two thousand years they have been untouched by other peoples; they have remained ethnically pure. That drops of alien blood came into the Jewish body corporate through the long centuries of their dispersion no one will deny. But so small have these outside elements been that they have not influenced to any appreciable degree the ethnical purity of the Jewish people”
now we know that is pure bullshit jews cluster with italian and their maternal linage is 80% european 10% from the caucasus and only 10 % ancestral jewish,the paternal linage is 20% european and 80% ancestral jewish
and here is explaining how the aryan race is only a myth >” The assumption that a fair, blue-eyed tribe invaded and intermingled with indians ,iranians…. is now almost unanimously regarded as a fable…. ” well we know now that aryan race really existed and the andronovo people(proto indo iranian) are genetically identical to today north east europeans ,lazaridis(jewish harvard profesor) a week ago recogniced this in a interview with one of the most prestigious indian newspaper.
Mr. Newman: Fancy ‘meeting’ you here again…
Maybe I missed something, but I don’t recall: What’s your solution to the College Debt problem?
Would that be: debtors’ prison, chastity belts, bashing HOA’s (so brave!), wildly misquoting people in order to bash HOA’s (even more brave!), or publishing dozens of comments on Unz Review?
It’s awfully easy to sit home and tell complete strangers: Your article made some good points… but YOU’RE WRONG!!!
As a recovering Liberty Nerd/Sniveling Perfectionist/lots of other things… I can spot those bad habits from miles away. (And YES, of course, I’ve overlooked TONs of other silly nonsense in the comments section here.)
Ditto for your Adopted Son ‘Chris’… nice guy (half the time)… so obsessed with protecting his enshrined ideology. Personally, I wouldn’t be so quick to appoint myself Sherriff to defend unbalanced, belligerent, bed-wetting, closet-commie, bomb-throwers (not Chris)… mainly that other dude. Are you a cop from Portland? :o)
Mr. Penfield:
A) Lighten up.
B) I wrote you all the details about what I objected to about your solution for the $1.6 Trillion student loan debt problem, that is debt forgiveness. It’s a big moral hazard.
C) Nah, I didn’t say “great article, but you’re wrong!” I wrote that you covered the whole big issue very well. Your long-term solutions, all that, the alternate (some new) methods of obtaining a higher education, the termination (I hope I remember this right) of the whole US Gov-guaranteed gravy train for the universities. are all excellent. It was the conclusion with your solution to the short-term problem, the big hole “we” are in that I didn’t agree with, and that’s a small matter compared to the big long-term picture.
D) My solution is nothing profound, and you are right that I never wrote it in comments. I just did a quick final post on Peak Stupidity (here). I just don’t think the laws mandating that student loan debt can’t be discharged in bankruptcy (a State matter) are Constitutional, no matter that the FEDs guaranteed the loans. Again, it’s not anything clever or profound, but I think a slow drain of the money that won’t/can’t be repaid via bankruptcy (a process that should be made MORE serious) is all that can be done.
E) 1) Stop digging – stop the program of federal loan guarantees. This alone, will put the kibosh on continual big tuition increases. 2) Fill the hole in – keep payments coming from those who pay, and let others get out with a tarnished financial record. 3) Start building – All the solutions you wrote about are nothing others haven’t looked into also, but, yes, we’ve got to get out of the 4-year traditional campus model, at least for Americans that can’t really, or don’t want to, afford it.
F) Lighten up some more, man. I just read through your comment again. I was looking forward to reading more from you and writing more to you, yesterday, but I’m getting the impression (hopefully a wrong one) that you are, well, somewhat high-strung. Just as with the tweeting, which is not something I participate in, it’s good to take a deep breath, read twice, and walk away for a while before you write back. I did SOME of that myself just now.
;-}
What are you talking about here? I don’t live in a place with an HOA. I agree that they are (supposed to be) a Libertarian’s dream.
The reason I’m not “taking action” is that I’m in no damn position to. I’m not in government, I don’t work at a bank, and I am not connected in any way with a university. I don’t owe anything, and (as I wrote before) I paid off my few thousand bucks that I did have for a few years, long ago. This commenting thing is a hobby of mine.
Please don’t pull a Lance Welton and get into the psychoanalysis, OK? You have no idea who I am. I make what I think are constructive criticisms along with plenty of praise for well-written stuff. I admit right here that I don’t write thorough analyses like yours on my blog.
I am glad that you did overlook anything you consider silly nonsense, as you would spend your whole day arguing back and forth. However, for the commenters that write back in a reasonable fashion and actually agree with something like 95% of your political viewpoint, why be a dick on here? There’s no call for that.
If this comment section, which is damn mellow so far compared to say, that under Fred Reed, John Derbyshire (sometimes), and even Ron Paul, is pissing you off so much then either a) Let is stand and stay aloof or b) Go all Paul Craig Roberts and get Mr. Unz to terminate the comments section for our writing. I can’t promise, but likely I’ll still read your stuff either way.
You lost me here, Chief. I know neither about the Portland story you are referring to nor who the not-Chris guy is. Are we talking about Calvin Coolidge? Amity Shlaes?
HAHAHA, very funny, Steve and I mean that now !
Listen, I’m no card-carying Libertarian, all my arguments were based on my having looked into their philosophy and comparing that to the sketch you drew of them, that’s all. I’m not tied to them by blood or bond, it’s just that so far, I have not found a more compelling philosophy. If you, some day put your philosophy forward in more detail, I will judge it with the same open mind I used to understand theirs. I do want to warn you at the onset that the hurdle is kind of high.
BTW I’m in no way obsessed by any of this but regard these questions as a lifetime puzzle to be taken out of the drawer and worked on when time permits.
No.
See Jon Entine’s column reporting on a genetic study of Ashenazi Jews for The Genetic Literacy Project. The genetic study found that the Ashkenazi Jews studied were on average EIGHTY PERCENT Italian through the maternal line, and equally overwhelmingly Middle Eastern / Semitic (i.e., the group that also includes Arabs and Sepphardic Jews) through the paternal line
So the typical Ashkenazi Jews are broadly ranged around 40% Italian and at least that much Semitic.
That doesn’t account for Slavic and Germanic genes that Ashkenazi Jews often have (though perhaps much less than the abundance of German family names among Jews might suggest).
Thus, speaking roughly, if the studied population is representative and not idiosyncratic for this group, Ashkenazi Jews are usually nearly half white European and most of the rest of their genetic makeup is associated with Semites.
I haven’t seen any genetic studies showing Ashenazim to be 80% European or anything like it, but I’m no expert in the field at all.
No apology? I thought that would be your response.
I have to hand it to you though, knowing you can’t logically refute my argument you don’t even try. That’s smart – limiting the damage to only what you’ve already said and not making more mistakes in reasoning.
I thank you for the opportunity to elaborate on my thoughts so that others may read through the very limited conversation and also see how shallow thinking on your part doomed your position. I post to make people think and you’ve helped me quite a bit.
Ahaaa! I see the problem. It’s mostly my mistake for not having written more text there, but you must have misinterpreted my quick comment ostensibly in reply to RedMudHooch. That was a COMMA, not a COLON, as I meant to point out to YOU Exhibit A of what you’ll see from Godfree Roberts’ Commies. (Note that I found exhibit B too, later on.) With either punctuation, that could have been interpreted wrong, as it was, after all, a reply to the RedMud guy. Sorry about that, Mr. Penfield.
Anyway, that explains your last paragraph. I’m so sorry we got on a bad footing here. I still don’t know the Portland reference, but that’s probably because I really don’t keep up with the TV news. Perhaps you could explain that.
Are you referring to Woolfolk? I clearly cited him not for his definition of the identity of jews! Honestly, I can’t even remember which definition he used. As far as I am aware, every definition has its obvious problems. And you can’t expect an author of the 19th century how had no genetic studies at his hands to have a flawless definition.
I cited Woolfolk for the economic analysis in the first third of his book where he argues quite convincingly that the economy of the US is dominated by the jewish money power which was seated at that time in the City of London. Since you don’t say a word to this analysis your “refutation” of Woolfolk remains spurious.
[As previously noted, all comments linking or referencing Miles Mathis are summarily trashed.]
You write that you want a summary of the references cited in #65. Re-read #65, which offers one. For more details, and substantiation, read the texts cited.
@ Ron Unz
So, a certain person is Lord Voldemord here. Interesting. Are there other taboos? If you could link to them (and to your reasoning why a certain person is anathema), I would be grateful, because it is a bit frustrating not to see a comment appear which took a while to write down.
https://www.unz.com/runz/american-pravda-understanding-world-war-ii/?display=showcomments#comment-3479865
Thank you for the link. I would say it is a sign of weakness to make someone anathema who has a sizeable following. Why not discuss his ideas? I am not a fan of this certain person, his method is questionable, in many papers are howlers, his bragging is often nauseating. But he has often interesting hunches and he certainly covers new ground. And God knows some topics really need a shake-up. The mindless Lindbergh veneration who was clearly controlled opposition his whole life would be a good example. I am not a fan of copying ideas without giving credit. So I think it should be allowed to mention this certain person if his ideas are worthy of discussion (and many of his ideas are in my opinion).
Hey Dude –
I’ll admit, as soon as I hit on my last comment, I had a tinge of guilt… that one was a bit much. You’re right (perhaps a tad exaggerated)… but I was overly critical in my last comment. Sorry about that!
I gotta do a better job of recognizing friend and foe. This is only my second article on Unz Review. And it’s the first one where I’ve decided to comment on. Lots of really nice people (which I appreciate)… but quite a few goons shooting their mouths off.
I meant before (but forgot) to mention, YES, that Amity talk on Calvin Coolidge was good. Of course, Cool-Hand Cal was great.
As far as the misquote I mentioned:
My comment #78 critiqued the Liberty crowd for fussing over private HOA’s and “the divine ‘right’ to breed chickens and park a boat in their front yard†(which is a phony right)
Your response #98 said: “and yes, even fight city hall together on the right to raise chickens in one’s backyard or work on the damn car out in the driveway.â€
To me, it’s kind of odd to go to the trouble of badly misquoting someone, then arguing against the misquote. Talk about a “straw dog.†Bold use of “damn,†by the way. Shows authority. :o)
Mocking HOA’s is not “fighting†anything. Certainly not city hall.
“Cop from Portland†is a reference to turning a blind eye on violent socialist wackos (e.g., Antifa), then OVER-REACTING to the more civilized members of society, because that’s the easy thing to do.
As far as the other stuff – way too many words for me to go back and forth.
Like a LOT of folks I talk with and read from, I see a tendency to LECTURE people: YOU ARE (this)… YOU ARE (that)… YOU, YOU, YOU. Ugh! That becomes draining really fast.
What is so hard about saying: I think (this) about (that) because of (whatever)…
Just noticed your line: “The reason I’m not ‘taking action’ is that I’m in no damn position to.â€
I could not DISAGREE with that more. Sorry to say, but that is classic Liberty Nerd… no “psychoanalysis” required.
There are SOOOOOO many things a person can do to make a positive difference, preferably OUTSIDE of government. Liberty zealots (not you) have convinced far too many people otherwise.
Howdy Chris – thanks again for taking the time to read & respond. I really do appreciate it!
Hopefully, I’ll get a 3rd article published in Unz in a month or so to explain my broader thoughts & findings some more. Lots of weak arguments and substancial failures from the left/right/liberty crowd to shoot down.
I looked at your comment #65 again. I tend to agree with some of your high-level assessments, I think. What I was hoping for is something with a lot more meat, not necessarily a post to the comments section.
You referenced (probably) hundreds of pages of text, maybe thousands. It would take anyone else hundreds of hours to find and sift through those books and articles… that you keep suggesting I should read. (Generally speaking, book-thumpers don’t impress me one bit. Kind of a pet peeve, since I’ve seen all the trouble they’ve caused. I greatly prefer a good condensed article… free is nice, too.)
That long paragraph looked like it took you (I’m guessing) 10 or 20 minutes to write. Looks like ‘stream of conscience’ kind of stuff. Well written, but more opinions/conclusions than supporting facts & logic.
Since you seem to be the Subject Matter Expert on the press for that era (no kidding) why not invest a FEW HOURS to educate people (like me) who have a genuine interest in that history? Better yet, maybe publish a detailed article on that period.
Let me tell you, it took me a whole lot more than a ‘few hours’ to write my last 2 articles on Unz Review.
Regards
great ! Excellent, Steve. I’m looking forward to it.
Yes, it’s good to keep some friends even on-line – it makes the comments more pleasant. Steve Sailer’s crowd is a great example.
I did not put quote marks around my phrase up above. That makes it not a quote, but a reference (to what you said). I’ll say it again: I am NOT in, and have not been in, a HOA. When you sign a contract, you are bound by the rules – there is usually no government involvement – that’s why I agreed with you that the Libertarians should not bring that up, unless it’s as a GOOD example of private contracts. Whatever you wrote back here shows that you are skimming and not catching my meaning. It may be partly my fault, as with the “reply” to RedMud…., when it was made to point out something to YOU.
No, Libertarians are right about too many rules (both at the high Fed level, but even at city government level) creating a anarch0-tyrannical society. There’ll be an ordinance made because one guy has a literal car junk yard – say 20 cars on his acre lot in all states of repair. Fair enough, on its face. The rule against that, however, will be used by anyone to stop me from replacing a water pump out front on one car … IF, and that’s the crux of it, IF we are not getting along. A friend spent over 7 years in a feud started over some small thing, but the neighbor called the city and had him working on this and that on his fixer-upper house at the whim of some dudes from the city. It went on and on and only stopped when she luckily died.
Now, you can keep repeating your BS about me, but, as I already wrote, I’m not in the pundit world. I blog on the Peak Stupidity site, but it is not my living, far, far from it in fact! I do live in the real world with a real job, but it is not the financial world. I’ll explain why I wrote that last clause in another comment.
I would not expect you to read through my over 10,000 comments here (yes, I don’t watch TV, why do you ask ;-} ), but you wouldn’t write a lot of what you wrote if you’d read mine. Why in hell would I convince people NOT to do anything. Many times, I’ve have come a hair short of advocating stuff that one shouldn’t advocate on a blog post.
I specifically was referring to the student loan debt problem when I wrote that there’s not much I can do about that (personally, and politically). Yeah, I can vote – big deal, but you say OUTSIDE of government. How about NOT living like a King in college, NOT owing any money to anybody for ANYTHING over the last 2 decades, and not spending like a typical American on the Bread & Circuses? That’s me.
One VERY BIG thing that Americans can do in their personal lives, after homeschooling (maybe # 1) is to not live paycheck-to-paycheck. As I wrote in Credit? Forget it! You got it? You get it! and More on living paycheck-to-paycheck, one is much more beholden to one’s employer, and more likely to put up this every kind of PC woke bullshit fed him, if he doesn’t have enough savings for his family to go a year or two. Well, I DON’T live like that. How about you, Mr. Penfield? What exactly are you doing in this regard? You got that one finger pointing, but you’ve got 3 more pointing back at you, yeah.
Lastly, with your “YOU, YOU, YOU” bit, well YOU are the writer. Any policy opinions I have don’t sound like that – just look at the comment of mine you replied to with this one. Most of it is my take on how that student debt crisis can be slowly resolved. Where’s the “YOU, YOU, YOU”?
Lastly, well, again, I can’t expect you to read everyone’s comments (even the amazing Mr. Unz can’t do that). However, I just wrote a few under Mr. Derbyshire’s recent post about the Proud Boys. If you had read my comments, you would have made that silly assumption that I somehow condone the antifa. That’s very far from the case, and I have no idea how in the world you came to that assumption. (You could peruse my blog on the topic key Anarcho-tyranny. Do you have an hour to waste?)
Here’s an idea: don’t assume things about the commenters until you’ve read them for a while. You are trying to get along, as I see. I will try to stay on topic more next post, but I feel a need to defend myself against wrong assumptions.
Your article wonders what happened with Mencken. I answered your question. I didn’t tell you to read the works for which I provided references. I offered them for your use, since they pertain to the line of discussion you are pursuing, and for the use of others interested in these questions. What you do with them is your own business. Your effort to issue me instructions is effrontery, and ludicrous.
Thank you moderator. Mathis is wrong on every theory and every fact.
Ok, if you say so, it must be true.
..THE.. ………..H..O..L…O……..H..O.A…..X……………….
What’s up, the whole thing is going fine here and ofcourse every one is sharing
information, that’s genuinely good, keep up writing.
The term “free press” means the freedom to print anything government officials approve of – particularly during war time which turns out to be well over 75% of the time the US has existed as a nation.
Kindly excuse the “anonâ€, but I read through some of your comments and found extraordinary book recommendations. If one wanted to know about Hitler’s economic policies and relative achievements, what source would you use?
This is a compelling account of FDR’ ego, vindictiveness, and obsession with war and domestic revolution. The sycophant press, vindictive, corrupt politicians and their allies, and struggles of independent thinkers in New Deal times are right out of today’s headlines about Google, Twitter, FB, the ADL, the SPLC, the NYT, the WP, YouTube, Lois Lerner, Assange, Flynn, Manning, Attkisson, Alex Jones, and endless garbage about Iran, Russia, Syria, our BFF south of Lebanon, “terror,” and our boundless arrogance.
Mr. Penfield’s dramatis personae of liberals, populists, and “right-wing Neanderthals found foraging at AM talk radio and FoxNews” seems oddly tendentious and sloppy in an otherwise judicious and insightful article.